my name is mwd

Yesterday I attended the Reboot Britain event hosted by NESTA, which was a call to reevaluate how Britain’s government and social services work in the age of expanding Internet access and social media. You only need to look at the mySociety projects page to see a glimpse of the things that are starting to happen in this area, so I was eager to see what revolution a group of like minded people might spark.

Unfortunately, despite the opening keynotes from Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA and Jeremy Hunt MP being motivational for the proposed revolution, a lot of the talks of the day seemed to fall short. That’s not to say they weren’t interesting, far from it. I saw a nice talk on energy visualisation from AMEE, and some interesting work from Riversimple on their open plans for a hydrogen car. But whilst interesting, neither of these were offered even a glimpse of the potential for huge change originally offered.

The closest I saw to revolutionary forward thinking on the connection between government and people was in a talk by Richard Foggie, Assistant Director Electronics Innovation in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, about how they want to get a unified app infrastructure for homes – how do you get services for what they called Web 3.0 (imagine Web 2.0 plus smart metering and sensors everywhere) for those without a PC? But unfortunately DBIS seemed to be approaching this by setting up technology committees to ponder it, despite the fact I can hit all the tech required with a bread roll from my breakfast table. What’s needed is plans to put together the technology providers with projects building houses to make sure it goes in. Mr Foggie did a reasonable job, but his audience seemed to miss some of the vision I think he had.

Perhaps I just picked bad sessions – there were typically four talks on at any given time, so you often have to take your chances just based on talk titles. Laura attended the Social by Social launch, an initiative to help people use social media for social change, which she though was interesting. Rory Cellan-Jones also commented he found Martha Lane-Fox’s talk on getting those without Internet access to be included interesting too. But the general consensus of the people I talked to seemed that most the talks failed to live up to the hyperbole of the opening promises.

The day did finish with an interesting talk on Internet literacies from Howard Rhiengold, which made for an interesting complement to Bill Thompson’s recent 10 Cultures talk. Laura and I also managed to make something out of Lego.

Still, it was hard after the early rhetoric and promise not to be slightly disappointed. I think for me the most interesting thought from the day was when Rory pondered how any of this might effect the upcoming UK general election. In this, I can see a little hope that the digital age might change things. Having participated in Rewired State earlier this year, and looking at the affect mySociety can have, I hope that there are enough well meaning hackers out there that can take what data the government has opened and other sources like those the Guardian are putting on line, and we can present it to help people make more informed choices. The government give us files that are either dull or hard to read, but Rewiredstate showed that a bunch of volunteers with a day to spare can clean it up and present it in a way that makes it easy for the average person to understand using tools they’re familiar with. Add to that getting people to contribute data into these tools, or crowd-sourcing data processing, I can only hope that when parties in the next election make wild claims they can be put to the test and made accountable. Perhaps there should be a monthly rewiredstate type event in the run up to the election. That way we can hope to make politicians and their parties actual be more open and honest. Perhaps it’s a wild bit of optimism, but I find it the most interesting and promising thought to come out of my day at Reboot Britain.