The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism.

Walking through the diagram…

“Zero marginal cost newtech” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business term for the extra amount it costs to make one more of something. For digital goods, such as MP3s or converted PDFs, this is essentially nothing. This leads to the possibility of cheaper and cheaper, more and more freemium business models, driving the value of the information good in and of itself to nothing. The arrows lead out to four options at this point.

1.”Hard to build small business” means you slowly and tirelessly build up a tiny, global business which eats on the scraps left, the stubborn customers, the niches. This doesn’t make much profit, and is hard work. Look at pay for email companies, as an example.

2.”Monopolies” is when you force the market to have no choice but pay you, such as Windows in the 1990s. Or perhaps where you reduce the cost to zero to gain the monopoly, and use advertising for revenue – such as Google Maps. TomTom’s old business looks weak nowadays!

3.”Low profit” means there isn’t much money in any pure software businesses there are. This leads to “Poor computer security architecture”.

“Corporate privacy invasion” is done deliberately by the zero-charging monopoly to help sell adverts, or to sell your data to insurance companies, or whatever. It is done accidentally by poorly architected security in low margin software businesses, meaning you have data breaches and loss of privacy.

4.”Social info goods (Linux, Wikipedia)” describes the plus side of the zero marginal cost. You can make public goods and distribute them to millions or billions of people cheaply and easily. This is very satisfying.

“Non-market value” explains that the value of these social information goods is not measured by flow of money. Actually, that’s true of the value of zero-charge capitalistic goods too.

“Low GDP” – so the economic productivity of your nation looks much lower than it is. It doesn’t include encylopedias any more, even though people are getting huge value from them, more than ever. 

“Low wages, part time jobs” – finally both the power of global monopolies, their reduction in local services, and the general reduction in visible GDP caused by zero-cost information goods, reduces wages and increases part time jobs.

This is really a variant on the classic “robots will eat all the jobs” argument. It’s a simpler version of it, based on the robot we all have called a computer, which can infinitely replicate a digital good, tirelessly and at no (marginal) cost.

It’s worse than for physical goods, as you can’t even tax these robots to fund a basic income.

I found another oldish notebook. It’s about the edge of chaos.

The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos – where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows.

There are four examples.

1. “Too few forum members” vs “Too many forum members”. If you start a new community, and nobody joins, it’s pointless emptiness. If it goes wild, and too many join, it ends up like a newspaper comments thread. There’s a pure balance, where the community is interesting and viable. (Reddit tries to avoid this dilemma by dividing itself in a cellular way making lots of subreddits)

2. “House alone” vs “Metropolis”. Living completely alone gives you no services no redundancy, living in a metropolis with tens of millions of people gives you slums and impossible property prices.

3. “No tech” vs “Intense tech”. Without any technology you’re impoverished. With too much, too fast, you can’t absorb it, polish it, make it fair, its dangerous side is emphasised.

4. “No customers” vs “Commodity competition”. When choosing a product/marketspace to enter you might pick one nobody will care about until after you’re bust. Or, just as bad, you might pick one where there isn’t just competition, but industrialised competition, where it is a standardised commodity impossible to compete with.

In every case there’s a balance. The question is, how to viably (with tangled hierarchy?) sustain that balance? A simple feedback loop will eventually steer you off into the void or into the white noise.

Everything that is good, everything that is alive, is at such a balance.

Sea. Sunlight. Calm. Trees. Laughter.

Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye.

I mention the history of public libraries worryingly often. I make an analogy between libraries in the age of the printing pres and the modern need for equivalently novel public institutions in the age of the networked computer. Time to find out more.

It was in the Victoria Gallery, just across the road from work. Great!

The price of books has shrunk in imaginative ways for centuries. One unusual example of how is in the form of James Lackington, a bookseller in London from the 1770s. He noticed that when sales of a book slowed, publishers kept the price full and pulped anything they couldn’t sell. He saved these books from destruction, sold these “remaindered books” at knock down prices, making both lots of money and increasing use of books in society.

This is a picture of the “The Temple of the Muses” bookseller which he started in Finsbury Square.

Liverpool had several interesting early libraries. In 1758, The Liverpool Library was established in a schoolmaster’s house. By 1802 they built the Lyceum building at the bottom of Bold Street to hold the library. It’s now a somewhat destitute building – Mark said that if anyone has a bequest of a million pounds, he has a plan to turn it into a beautiful museum of the history of libraries!

The Liverpool Medical Library was started in 1799 by a group of important Liverpool doctors. There were some very expensive medical texts at the time, that local booksellers didn’t stock. One doctor could only afford a small number of books – together lots of doctors could buy them all. (Reminds me of what PledgeBank was trying to achieve with our local pledges).

This is Robert Hooper’s “A Compendious Medical Dictionary, containing an Explanation of the Terms in Anatomy, Physiology, Surgery”, published in 1798, and perhaps the kind of book they were buying. (I’ll try and get back to the Gallery to take a photo of a real book they actually bought, unless anyone already knows of one online…)

As caricatured in this painting by Isaac Cruikshank, circulating libraries concentrated on more downmarket books. At least, the romances and the novels in the cartoon are all taken out, whereas the worthy histories and philosophies are still on the shelf. Not so different from complaints in my lifetime about television being downmarket – just before it entered its current phase of Dickens-like quality.

 

At each stage of this, books became cheaper and more accessible to more people, and literacy levels rose. One of the final steps in free access to books for everyone was the Public Libraries Act 1850. That’s a full four centuries after the printing press seriously came to Europe.

Afterwards, I asked Mark about the analogies I’ve been making between the modern world and libraries. He wasn’t aware of anyone who was specifically researching or thinking on that basis. A “future of libraries” meeting a few years ago was about the physical spaces, not, say, about public space on the web.

He did say that there are numerous ideas to mine from the history, some which worked for a while, some which didn’t work, as well as those we still know and use now. It turns out the vast, wild sea of ideas of the modern web, things like Patreon and Wikipedia, is an echo in new technology of a soup of ideas a few centuries ago.

He recommended that I should read A Nation of Readers by David Allan. Alas, a bit out of print!

The talk was in honour of a new exhibition a the Victoria Gallery, of very old Liverpool books. Hopefully I’ll remember to go back one lunchtime while it is still on.

[1] A site which lists interesting talks in Liverpool each week. Interestingly, scraping wasn’t good enough to make the site – Paul instead outsources some of the process of finding a curated, clean list of events via UpWork to a fully qualified, fluent English speaking lawyer in the Philippines.

I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old.

I used to campaign in Cambridge for more Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. That was a “closed” tactic, as opposed to an “open” tactic like open source software or open data.

It worked – even the best selling chocolate bar Dairy Milk is Fairtrade now. The tactic slightly shifted the board of global economics.

These notes are about this question – what tactics create the change in the world that I want?

Simon Wardley has a kind of map of evolution of technology. He encourages organisations to make such maps to improve their strategic awareness.

Vinay Gupta made a game called nuclear poker. It has simple rules that simulate the important game theory of nation states and nuclear weapons.

I played it once, and to start with I wanted to win! The natural urge, when just told the rules, is to collect the cards, to gain abilities. Before I knew it I was thinking I might nuke someone pre-emptively to stop them becoming a  superpower before me… Then I realised I’d turned into a psychopath.

(I role played the next round as Hans Blix, weapons inspector, trading and discarding key parts of the nuclear tech stack to eliminate them from the game)

Much like Vinay’s poker game, when I see Simon’s maps of tech, they at first make me want to win. Unfortunately, because of the structure of capitalism and technology, that essentially means frig the game so you get a monopoly and make billions.

However, the idea doesn’t inspire me. I know the monopoly would have to be broken down later to make things fair. And that it’ll happen anyway, someone else will find it. It doesn’t feel like it changes the game.

(Of course I’d love to make billions, and partly I’m just hiding because it is hard, and risky to try more. But nevertheless, as a goal it doesn’t inspire me like it does some people.)

I’d much rather mutate the board, change the game. Or force others to mutate the board for me.

In the past I’ve used tactics to do that – more open, more innovative, more fun! They’re not directly what I’m after, they’re just new things to use that let me change the board.

Actually what I want is 1) to end poverty of all kinds, 2) to make civilisation fundamentally sustainable for tens of thousands of years, 3) to fully understand the universe and our minds.

My dumb error for a while was to think it was the framed societal goal (money) of the board, or the tricks that worked for me before (open) that I liked.

I was around at the start of both Open Knowledge and mySociety. I always preferred mySociety’s tactics, because they were about an end goal (usable Government) rather than about a means (open data).

You can blindly promote Freedom of Information (it’s under threat by the way, and you can help) in the hope that it reduces corruption. It might not. You can promote open data in the hope that it improves Government efficiency. It might not.

In contrast, the aspects of mySociety that were about usability – they were more straightforwardly successful. The means were also the end. And they inspired the Government Digital Service to take that further.

What we were doing at mySociety was taking the culture of open source and the culture of the web, and applying it to Government. We didn’t strategically know what we were doing. Although we had a strong sense that this new technology could help with some political problems.

The next, and final, page of my notes gets less clear and more speculative. Here I think I’m saying that the overall strategy of large, classic NGOs isn’t very clear.

It is those NGOs which are trying to deliver the end of poverty, the sustainability which I gave as goals earlier.

I’m now wondering, where can the strategy for those things come from? How can we learn to change the game so the whole system is more sustainable, or has less poverty?

What created the web and open source culture, that our intervention at mySociety completely depended upon? I’m curious how to make more such cultures.

Is the Wardley map any good for this kind of analysis? I suspect not – it is designed for technology capitalism. Which is perhaps why I always find it frustrating. Maybe there is a way of using it that will help with what I need.

Either way, Wardley’s innovation/commoditisation cycle with dependencies and user needs is useful background.

I leave the question hanging, how do we map the board so we can make interventions to improve the overall outcome of the game?

The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers. Its subject – how do we make the net resilient, private and fun again?

It was an unconference, so I decided to do a session on a personal itch I’ve had for the last few years – file synchronisation and backup.

I don’t have a nice way to manage my files – documents, music, photos, email. Syncing them across devices and keeping them backed up seems strangely harder than it did in the 1990s. At least, if you don’t just go all in and trust Google or Dropbox with them.

The idea of the workshop was to find out what decentralized software technical people actually use every day for syncing and backing up their files.

We wrote down all the tools on cards, and voted with sticky notes if we used them. I was hoping there was some amazing tool based on newish technology like Distributed Hash Tables that I could use. There wasn’t.

So here’s the tools geeks use, working up to the favourite at the end.

Syncthing (0 votes)

This is one of the few actually peer to peer tools which came up – it directly syncs files between devices. Lots of people mentioned it, which is why it got a card even with no votes. Alas, none of us use it day to day. It just isn’t mature enough. Every six months I try it again, hit an unsolvable problem and revert to BitTorrent Sync. They’re working hard to improve Syncthing, and I’m sure would welcome more help.

PhotoBackup (1 vote)

Looks like a nice solution to get files off your camera phone and onto your own server. It’s a pain that it needs a special server to post the files to – I’d like it more if I could configure it to just use SCP (see the SSH section below).

Carbon copy cloner (1 vote), Time Machine (2 votes)

A few people recommended proprietary Mac tools. They considered them decentralized, because they keep the backups on their own multi-terabyte hard drives at home, rather than putting them in one central cloud. No doubt they’re polished and easy to use – I still use CrashPlan on an old Mac for that reason! Alas, they’re no good if you have even one device with another operating system.

ownCloud (2 votes)

This self-hosted email/calendar/contacts/file sync tool is a powerful combination. Surprisingly few people use it. My theory is that it tries to do too much itself, and does none of it quite well enough. I found it too slow, clunky, and unconvincing to trust my most valuable data to. I’m optimistic that it’ll continue to improve.

duplicity (2 votes)

While researching backup for myself, I find price is a constant frustration. All the most open ones require a server with a live disk mounted on it. S3, an Amazon service that can just store blobs, is considerably cheaper. It’s even cheaper than Dropbox, which is built on top of S3 and adds a margin!

A couple of people at the workshop took advantage of this price while keeping privacy by using duplicity. It encrypts files and stores them in S3. I find that a bit of a cheat – some control is still lost, it isn’t resilient. As economies of cloud storage scale even more, I’m open to changing my mind!

Tarsnap (2 votes)

This technically excellent Unix backup tool also uses S3 behind the scenes. It is by all accounts easy to set up, fast and powerful. My one concern is that it is too dependent on its founder Colin Percival. You really want backup software to have a whole community maintaining it, or a strong company with incentives to keep the service running. Or it won’t be there when you really need it.

SSH (4 votes)

People using SSH probably overlap with the rsync people below, or they were using scp or bup or unison or something similar. All of these excellent command line sync and backup tools need a protocol to send files remotely, and that’s SSH. Stalwart, and to this day what geeks use to write data remotely from automated processes. It’s that basic writing functionality which I want some funky new DHT to improve.

rsnapshot (5 votes), rsync (1 vote)

It’s hard now to remember how revolutionary rsync was when it came out (apparently in 1996!). Rolling checksums make file copying fast the second time, enabling all sorts of new backup and sync possibilites. The raw technology idea was vital to Dropbox’s genesis. Nearly everyone at the workshop used rsync via rsnapshot, a layer which can backup whole machines and archive their history.

git (6 votes), git-annex (1 vote)

I use git with an auto-commit script to keep important text documents. One workshop member used git-annex, making even large files not a problem. It’s very geeky, but it’s very reliable – history and checksums and decentralization make it very hard to lose data. It does two way sync, but unlike Dropbox actually merges the files.

A key problem for me with this is that Android support is woeful. In the end, I fix that with a nasty hack – I use BitTorrent Sync to transfer a directory on my phone to a server, and have a script there which merges and commits.

Thinking about it, git is the biggest obvious opportunity which came from this workshop. Just as Dropbox was built on rsync technology, could something very user friendly be built on top of git, for the purpose of personal document syncing? Add a peer-to-peer transfer protocol, a beautiful GUI, three way merge of Word documents… The internals built by Linus would make it robust and reliable.

OS file browser + standard protocols (1 vote)

At the end I asked the room, “who is happy with their solution?”. Only one person put their hand up. She had tried every nerdy backup tool imaginable, and abandoned them all.

Instead, she keeps files on her computer and her relative’s computer. If she’s making a document she cares about, she transfers it by USB stick between the computers, to make sure there are multiple copies in different places. And that’s it.

Unsophisticated? Not at all. Way easier than backing up paper. Understandable by anyone. Full control. Cheap.

Conclusions

Thanks to everyone who came to the workshop. I was disappointed that there wasn’t a solution to my problem. However, I learnt several valuable things, including one to improve what I do in the short term.

I need my own (virtual) server (again) – there were several folk from Bytemark at Redecentralize. They made me realise that I had been trying for a while to not need my own server. Alas, the fully distributed solutions just aren’t good enough yet. You need something you can make web requests to and SSH to if you want to use OwnCloud, git, ssh or rsync. It’s a relief to accept this.

Simple is better, sometimes – the happiest person was doing manual file copying like you would have done before “the cloud” in the 1990s. It’s obvious to non geeks, don’t be afraid of doing this. Of course, you accept downsides, but you gain upsides of simplicity and peace of mind.

Someone will win with an inspiring UI on top of Git – merging of text files, robust history, fast and reliable. There are fundamental technical reasons why git is good for some of this stuff. Just as Dropbox used rsync technology and brought it to hundreds of millions, one day somebody will bring these benefits of git to the world.

We need low level distributed storage / naming – personal servers running Dropbox clones will keep us going for a while, but at the end of the day this worrying about servers, about named computers, is part of the problem. At some point, a distributed file storage will take off. IPFS is exciting, although it has no charging mechanic so can never be “fire and forget”. My best hope right now is MaidSafe. When they ship!

There is a market for a geeky command line sync/backup tool – despite all the open alternatives, nothing works well enough that it has dominated the market. I’m confident that technical people haven’t solved this problem for themselves, and want it solved. Powerful interfaces can then be built on that stable base.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations.

I think we need some quite big, radical things. They’ll need new public service Internet organisations to implement.

This is my high level view list.

1. Access to culture

“People have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.” (one MP’s response to the Public Libraries Act 1850)

The printing press wasn’t a fair innovation until centuries later, when Victorians made the public library widespread. Some of the Internet is free at the point of use, due to advertising and due to the free culture movement. Some of it isn’t.

Much of the most detailed, intelligent reporting – such as the Financial Times and the Economist – is not free. Much vital culture – such as the Wire – is not free.

There are numerous business publications and research organisations, which aren’t free.

I think we’ll need a method, similar in purpose to public libraries, which gives poor teenagers access to the same culture as rich ones. Which gives someone with few resources starting a new business access to the same data as a rich corporation.

Where to start: Build on existing physical libraries – make sure they have subscriptions to paid for aspects of research and culture. Build on free culture. Imaginative ideas for new funding methods.

2. Digital literacy

Many technology innovations only reach their best when complemented with mass education.

We teach nearly everyone in the UK to read and write. A majority learn to drive. Without that quite complex training, the printing press and the car would be just for an elite.

What could everyone learn which would help us make better use of computers? Usability, which I love, will only get us so far. Until we have strong Artificial Intelligence (it’ll be a while), many people in society will need to understand computers well.

There are still plenty of technology changes to come, and we can’t know exactly what to teach until after they’ve happened. Meanwhile, we can make a start, and iterate as we learn more.

Where to start: Teach children to code. Make sure employees can use spreadsheets in a sophisticated way. Even teach police to type! (Richard Pope‘s idea after seeing a desk sergeant who was very slow at entering his paperwork)

3. Professional programming

Engineers don’t build bridges that fall down, not any more. Software is constantly broken, our data stolen and our privacy breached.

There’s a whole lot of it which needs rebuilding in new ways which are barely researched yet. The industry needs to be professional to do this.

Ethical policies which help defend privacy. Quality policies which make it secure. Diversity policies which makes it usable for everyone… There are lots of things a professional programming organisation could improve.

I’ve benefited a lot from the accessibility of programming – I learnt as a hobbyist child from my father. We can make programming both accessible, and professional.

Where to start: Look at other engineers. Look at other professions, like doctors and lawyers. Join and improve ethical professional bodies. Consciously try to not harm the freedom which general access to programming gives in the process. Create standards.

4. Building regulations

Increasing skills is important, but won’t be thorough enough. We need to enforce standards by law too.

Some of these will be mundane but vital, such as websites using only a few standard sets of terms and conditions. Others will be life saving, such as making sure your driverless car manufacturer has a high standard of software engineering practice.

Where to start: Regulate to stop coding in unsafe languages. Support organisations like I Am The Cavalry (automotive software safety). Build on industry guidelines until they are mandatory (e.g. MISRA).

5. Ethical cryptography

It would be foolish to use no encryption, allowing Governments and criminals to spy on everything we do. And completely unethical.

It is just as wrong to hope that all things will be encrypted in a libertarian utopia. There are criminals and enemies who courts should be able to get evidence from.

This blog post by Vinay Gupta describes the three actors which cryptography should model – the users, the Government and criminals. It describes a much more sophisticated threat model than we tend to talk about.

Where to start: Implement ideas like Cheap ID and jury-based crypto. Develop capability to practice a hybrid of law and tech. Use that to develop technical / legal systems similar to constitutions.

6. Power framework

There’s a war over who has access to the core ability of computers – to program them in arbitrary ways.

How is what computers do controlled?

To understand the issue, read Cory Doctorow’s article The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing. It’s a very complex question.

Where to start: Build on organisations like the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Open Rights Group. Academic research which combines the abstract philosophy of delegated agency with practical user needs.

Conclusion

What do you think needs doing to make our new information society safe and fair? Leave a comment!

This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world.

Forces smash hither and fither, 7 billion of us strange qualia,
doing, being human.

Web culture, open source culture… sucked out of academia,
hacking, sharing, making, funning, building. Just late enough
for usability to be just there just cheap enough.

Smashed with.

Political culture… burnt out, tired, so so so good best
world has ever been, so so so broken, media corporate
capitalist socialist thought tangle.

Wonks, meet Geeks.

Geeky wonky wonky geeky geeky wonky geeky wonky geek geek
geek geek wonk wonk wonk wonk.

Only in England. Honourable neutral, civic servile, playful,
statirical. A soup, aglutinating not once but many times –
digitrights faxing, illegal-war voting, political surveying…

Pulled together into an organ, into a community, into a charity.
Inspiring. Beast poking.

Poke.

Prod.

Stab.

Love.

Stroke.

Care.

Help.

Nurture.

Love us hate us join us be us. Pester your politicians, repair
your civic infrastructure, free your information!

there are few of those very brief moments those times when two
things combine in the right place with the right skills and
set the pulse and light up and burn and grow and all the
people and all the amazing people and spread spread from
this island round the world ideas filtering through a million minds
and alter the framing change the expectations uplift uplift
hope hope hope.

Those very brief moments.

When winning seems possible.

How is she going to vote? My friend (let’s call her F) just doesn’t know.

This isn’t unusual – about 20% of voters are like her (see Q3).

She needs to work it out fast. She doesn’t like polling stations, so has a postal vote. She has to decide this weekend – or she’ll get busy with work, and not remember to post the ballot in time.

mySociety helpfully list 16 voter advice apps, so I decided this was a chance to test them out!

This is a real voter, who doesn’t like politics – or to be precise finds it “inaccessible”. Exactly the kind of person these apps are trying to help. She’s a 30 year old professional, lives in Liverpool.

It’s a pretty harsh bit of user testing, I’m not going to sweeten my report of her reactions to the sites. So here goes… (Skip to the end for a summary if you get bored)

1. Who Should You Vote For? 0/10

We’re on mobile (my Fairphone 1, using Opera browser) – for one thing, we’re on a train and then in a coffee shop. For another, F says she would never do this on her laptop. If she had spare time at home, she’d be more likely to watch Netflix. Voting intention is relegated to spare time while waiting for a bus.

She read the first two questions of Who Should You Vote For? – one about a 50% tax rate for top earners, another about the mansion tax.

Then declared it boring. She doesn’t care about the questions, and there are too many of them.

2. Vote for policies 1/10

F immediately liked being offered a choice of issues that she cared about. She hated the wording on the more detailed questions that followed – didn’t understand them.

She gave up after the first party. If she could have skipped to the second party she would have, but you can’t click on the numbers to do that.

My view is that the site uses wordings from manifestos, and these just aren’t written in an accessible way.

3. Position dial 0/10

“Pictures? What’s all this stuff? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

She closed the window. The site is just too confusing a mush, without a clear call to action.

4. iSideWith 9/10

F likes the questions. The interface on mobile was “a bit jerky” – for some reason it kept zooming in when choosing answers. There was also no explicit skip button for questions, but she found out that you can just not answer them.

She liked the “more stances” button, although it rarely satisfied her. In one case she actually typed in a new detailed one!

We lost her answers due to the mobile browser and the train. She didn’t mind – reentered them in the coffee shop. She liked it that much.

She got her answer: Lib Dem 98%, Labour 98%, Green 93%, Conservative 65%. She then tried the function to compare results, she wanted to know why the scores varied. What were the important policies? It wasn’t clear.

All told, the high score was because she found the questions comprehensible, of the right volume, and fun to answer.

5. Vote Match 7/10

It feels like a speed dating site!

“Too hard” – dragging the order of topics. F put the first three in order, but then got stuck. She didn’t know what “political power” meant or what “trending issues” meant. Nevertheless, she went to the next stage no problem.

Her first reaction is that she doesn’t like the questions much, but isn’t sure why. The iSideWith ones were just easier to understand. For example – the “find out more” button for the fracking question explains what fracking was, but gives no context as to why it might be good or bad, or what current policy is.

“The Government’s top priority should be too sort out the deficit” – F didn’t like the wording of the question. It is important, but surely top priority should be to keep us safe and not starving! (My view is that this is over use of standard political wording, which is alienating)

“Public spending should be maintained at least at current levels” – F doesn’t understand what “public spending” means – it doesn’t say what spending! Depends what they cut. Isn’t very clear. (Again this is a political class phrasing and argument, meaningless in day to day life)

“UK is better off in the EU” – doesn’t tell F the postivies/negatives. There is no find out more. Wants a list of advantages / disadvantages of being in the EU.

Result: Green 73%, Labour 70%, Lib Dem 63%, UKIP 38%, Conservative 30%.

F’s assessment so far: This is not helping – one quiz said vote Green the other vote Labour! They didn’t say why in either case.

(Later F tried the Telegraph version of this and quickly realised it was the same. She was skeptical, worried Telegraph would be bias.)

6. YourCandidates.org.uk 1/10

I’ve put in my postcode. It’s telling me what people are. Why? Tells me how to contact them. Hasn’t told me anything about them.

F didn’t see link to “Personal homepage”, she thought it was another contact link.

With prompting, she then tried a website of Green candidate. She found there was too much to read, it was irrelevant blog posts, nothing about policies. Wanted policies.

Neither she nor I noticed the “Choose comparison” dropdown, which lets you compare policies, until I was making this blog post later. It’s a bit clearer on desktop.

7. Tickbox 2/10

Weird that they all want my postcode.

The initial “Have I decided who to vote for” annoyed her – of course not, that’s why she’s using the site!

She’d heard people talking about Trident, knew it was about defense, but didn’t know what it was. She liked the explanation on the site – that it was about
cost vs. security. She likes the explicit “don’t know” button. “GP surgeries 7 days a week” – F was surprised! A new question that none of the other sites had asked.

Result: 1) Tory 2) Lib Dem 3) Labour

She didn’t like the answer, doesn’t believe she’s Tory (doesn’t like them, and other quizes didn’t suggest them). Also it only answered 5 questions. So she goes for 5 more questions.

10 questions in: 1) Lib Dem 2) Labour 3) Tory

No Green! Only 3 parties. Not useful. She likes the explanations of the questions on Tickbox, but just doesn’t believe their results. She kept going to see if they stabilised. Grammar schools – likes them, first time asked! (Clever kids get left behind in current schools, not fair)

15 questions in: 1) Labour 2) Tory 3) Lib Dem

Still doesn’t believe it. Also says that the “5 more questions” button isn’t very forceful, and loads of people would miss it. So get incorrect answers from too few questions.

20 questions in: 1) Tory 2) Labour 3) Lib Dem

“It is just making it up”. Likes questions and explanations, but pointless if it is just giving a rubbish result. She asks a general question – how can I know if these quizzes are bias?

8. Who Shall I Vote For 5/10

Too much text on the first page saying it isn’t bias, F didn’t read it and it annoyed her (!).

She likes the choice of issues again. Although now is worried might miss important things. She realises how hard it is to ask about the right issues in these quizzes. She didn’t want to pick 3 topics, it made her pick 3. Now has to do 10 questions on things she doesn’t care about.

UX pain – couldn’t go back and set scale on first question, when on second question. She doesn’t like the lack of any explanation of the questions.

Yay, first to ask about badgers! Likes that.

There’s then a principles section which asks really general philosophical questions about approach to life and decisions. She finds them really hard to answer, and has to skip loads of them.

Male or female – why’s it need to know! (She skimmed and didn’t see the “research purposes” bit). She then refuses to tell it who she would vote for – thinks it may bias it, and that it is none of its business. I try to get clarity on this, but couldn’t – it was very instinctive reaction. Doesn’t want to give postcode, hated that, no reason for site to ask.

Result: 1) Green 2) Labour 3) SNP 4) Plaid 5) Lib Dem

Asked very detailed about 3 things she cared about. She likes breakdown of every question by party.  Overall though, a bit too detailed. Rather be asked more generic questions about fewer topics.

9. WhoGetsMyVoteUK 2/10

Sex/age/education – she hates being asked. The copy says “this app does not collect any personal identifying information”, so she says “why does it need this personal info then”? Skip!

She pressed wrong answer for a question, then the back button goes back to beginning not to the previous question. Rubbish!

Questions seemed OK, but hated losing all her work when trying to go back. Gave up quickly.

She’s getting bored :)

10. Verto 0/10

F doesn’t like being asked where born and where lives. Doesn’t want to answer loads of data collection questions.

This app has left/right swiping like Tinder, which she has never used. She can’t remember which means like and which means dislike! Noticing she’s being slow, the site pops up a helpful dialog.

That doesn’t clearly explain which direction is which, so she still doesn’t know! Gives up.

Overall view – she likes idea of playing a game, but it took to long to get there with other questions, and then had a confusing swipe interface.

11. Voting Counts Policy Matrix 0/10

F thought could click on Issues like NHS but can’t. Why such big space when not links? She complains she can’t compare breakdown of parties, that it should be in table!

It’s then that we realise the site doesn’t work right on mobile. I show her the desktop version on my laptop, and she likes the look of it – but that isn’t relevant to this test, which is mobile only.

12. Your Democracy 0/10

Got to create an account – not doing that. Can’t be bothered.

13. Awedience -1/10

This site asked for F’s postcode, when she entered it it said “Unknown analysis”.

She was so annoyed that she’d gone to the effort of giving her postcode, but got nothing back, she gave it a negative score.

14. Election Compass 0/10

There’s a bug on mobile – can only see half the page, and can’t zoom or drag sideways.

15. The Economist 0/10

F at first worries they’re bias. Suspects they’re not, but isn’t sure why she thinks that.

She complains she can’t read it properly – fonts too small on mobile. Then a box pops up, and she can’t read all the content.

She gives up.

16. YourNextMP.com 0/10

Another site that just tells me about the candidates. Doesn’t help me decide who I’m going to vote for.

F felt it would be more useful a site to someone who is into politics and already knows stuff. She also felt she’d already seen it – same kind of experience as YourCandidates. Overall, boring.

17. Democracy Club CVs 0/10

I decide to test out this site, which I made! F knows it’s mine, but doesn’t hold off on criticism…

She enters her postcode, then says that because not everyone has submitted their CV, it is not representative. It does makes her think they can’t be bothered, so she sees that as a negative.

It doesn’t help her decide, tells her about the person. She wants to know about policies.

I don’t want to vote for XXX because she has good experience, if she also kills badgers!

Summary

• Do user testing. Lots and lots and lots of it.
• Write the content properly. Don’t use wordings from manifestos, or any wonkish part of the political system.
• Explain what things mean and current policy. Help the voter relate issues to their own knowledge / opinions.
• Develop and test on mobile. May as well write it in Swahili if you don’t.
• Several quizzes were rejected entirely because of small (in code!) UX bugs which made them unusable.
• Don’t ask personal questions like sex / age / postcode, or even how voted last time. Off putting.
• When giving results, explain simply why – what policies most distinguish the parties in context of what voter cares about.

The winning app is iSideWith! Second and third place go to Vote Match and Who Shall I Vote For.

Nobody else came close, all scoring 2 or less out of 10.

After all that, F still doesn’t know how to vote. She needs help choosing a criteria to distinguish Labour and Green.

My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament.

It’s called Democracy Club CVs.

I’ve been working every spare hour – mainly around midnight and on Sundays. Partly it is technically interesting, partly the other Democracy Club volunteers are fun to hang out with…

It’s also just enjoyable, with leaflets from ex-whips, professional musicians and raving loony leaders (that last one is standing against Boris).

But that doesn’t really explain … why am I doing it?

Background matters

The idea for the site came from this election leaflet Julian found in the 2010 election (Guardian article). It has a kind of CV written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opponent. Take a look.

I don’t have a fixed idea of what background makes a good MP. I do, however, like the idea (thanks James) that their background should be representative of their constituents.

Hopefully, when we have enough CVs, academics linked to Democracy Club can start doing this kind of analysis.

Layout and form

Aine, one of the directors at ScraperWiki, really likes CVs. It’s not that they’re magical things that tell you everything you need to know about a job applicant. Why is it?

Firstly, the form of the CV tells you quite a bit.

Is it clearly laid out, easy to read, spelt correctly? Is it evidently a CV they’ve used to apply for other jobs recently, or have they never had to apply for a job and it is just their political bio recanned?

It’s not just me that thinks this matters – we ran some user testing with unconnected members of the public, and it was the main thing they judged the CVs on.

To try and encourage good formats, we added this to the upload page.

In later desperation, I also gave a link to the National Careers Service advice on writing a CV.

Skills and talents

Secondly, the content gives some indication of skills.

Would our Prime Ministers like a better talent pool to pick ministers from? Would it increase quality in the way the country is run? I don’t know!

But it wouldn’t hurt to try!

You can pick a maths teacher,  a mental capacity lawyer, a manufacturing engineer, an expert in changing complex organisations, a carbon capture lead… And that’s just from the few CVs we have in already.

With a CV the details tell you lots – the exact list of places and names of companies, whether there are gaps. The progression in job titles. It’s all that detail which you can pattern match on, in a way that you can’t for a short bio.

There’s plenty of talent out there. I think it is part of our job as voters / recruiters to select for talent.

It’s outrageous to complain the country is badly run, if we don’t even do basic due diligence in selecting good people to run it.

Conclusion

Of course, the CV isn’t the be all and end all. It is a minimum. It’s the least possible thing we could look at.

Sometimes I tell people this site is satirical, and they don’t quite get the joke. It’s this:

We, as voters, are interviewing candidates for the £67k job of creating all our laws, and directly running the administration of half our economy.

Yet we don’t routinely do what every employer does for even the lowliest job.

Look at their CV.

If you’ve read this far, I’d love it if you’d help us get more CVs! It’ll only take a couple of minutes. Go to http://cv.democracyclub.org.uk/, put in your postcode, then email and/or tweet all your candidates to ask them to upload your CV.

P.S. My CV has been public and on my website since the 1990s. I have never stood for Parliament.