In his TED talk on education innovation, Charles Leadbeater introduces a map of the territory based on two axes: sustaining/disruptive and formal/informal. He argues that most of our resources are concentrated in the first quadrant, but that globally, we need to invest energy in the fourth.
I liked the organising principles – it might be a very useful way to think about future projects. So I redrew it:
If you want, download a nice, scalable, printable PDF version (100kb).
I made the above in a collaborative project with Jonathan McCabe. If you check his Flickr stream you can probably tell that he’s an awesome coder with ideas-aplenty.
The project was to build a generative system to model something from nature. We chose the human iris, and in particular the radial fibres that in some people split and clump to form these circular openings.
In case you’ve never noticed these fibrous openings before, see the image on the right. It comes from a book on the Rayid model of iris interpretation (not the same thing as iridology).
At Govhack a small team of folks started working on the idea of visualising all the activities of the (Australian) federal government, so that as citizens we are better positioned to identify where we’d like to intervene in government processes. This post documents the progress we made.
Our work focussed on a single data file from this National Archives set – agencies.xml, which lists all the Commonwealth Agencies ever to have existed (around 7000, with around 2000 extant), along with 212 functions that they perform.
Rob Manson did some invaluable work in converting the data into more usable forms – taking out the sizeable – but sometimes empty – NOTES field, and producing various json (and plain text) files that included different combinations of data.
Here is my tagcloud of functions of the Australian government made using ManyEyes:
It’s an interesting array but its meaningfulness is questionable. Text is sized according to its occurrence in the data, which could mean that multiple agencies are responsible for that function, or that it has been passed around a lot from agency to agency, or simply that it has been around since Federation or before (eg, telecommunications, taxation). A smaller font could also indicate a relatively new function (eg, criminology), or one subject to terminological shifts (eg, foreign policy has become international relations). Then there are perplexing aspects of the data, such as that quarantine started in 1832 but ended in 1993 even though it remains a preferred level-two term in AGIFT – under primary industries. Hm, there are plenty of issues here.
Officially (ie, according to the Functions Thesaurus) there are only 25 top-level functions – the rest are either sub-functions or non-preferred terms. But clearly there are discrepancies between the official terminology and the actual descriptive data. Ultimately, for this project to succeed as a public map, we will need to also enable people to use other, unofficial, vernacular, folksonomic terminology as well. Has anyone ever tried tagging terms? Tag tagging – hm, there’s a concept.
Another aspect of this project is that people might identify functions that the government should be performing but is apparently not.
Rob also produced some great images, focusing on a single function and showing the complex array of agencies that perform that function. For example, here are some of the current agencies doing SCIENCE – click for the full graphic:
One lesson here is obvious: Commonwealth government is amazingly complex! See also the mess of agencies performing these other functions: INDIGENOUS | EMPLOYMENT | TRANSPORT | COMMUNITY.
Finally, Brenda Moon made significant progress on her path to use Processing to visualise the agencies and functions in a spectacular array based on NYTimes 365/360 by Jer Thorp – again, click to download the full PDF:
What now?
These are all first steps, but we had fun exploring, and we’ve raised many questions and issues. As well as how to show – and enable interaction with – the dynamic relationships between agencies and their functions, incorporating date ranges, locations, and vernacular terminology, there is no doubt much else to consider.
I’m thinking, for example, about how functions themselves could be structured so that the array is more visually readable. Would it work to plot or colour them according to two axes – whether the object of the function is individual or collective, tangible or intangible? (Eg, some more individual-oriented functions include health, employment and immigration, where communications, civic infrastructure and environment are more collective. Environment and civic infrastructure are also more tangible, along with primary industries, in comparison to governance, business support and regulation, and justice administration, each of which has fairly intangible processes and products.
I’m also wondering whether the agencies.xml file is more problematic than useful as a source of functions data. Other sources of similar information might work better. AGLS is a contender, although it has not been consistently implemented across government. Maybe the AAOs that I used to make this other tagcloud are a more reliable source. At least there the frequency/size of the term corresponds to the amount of legislation passed to manage it. Or perhaps we should look at this issue another way. For example, in talking to Gordon Grace, from AGIMO, it might be possible to obtain some bulk data on what people are searching for at australia.gov.au. Possibly, whatever data forms the foundation of the array of government activities, the rest will need to be crowdsourced.
One more point to note: once the initial interface was populated and making sense, it would be good to direct users to several destinations:
So, this project seems to be growing some legs ! and I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion with all interested parties.
With some trepidation due to my lack of geek credentials, I have registered to attend Govhack. Keen to find out how I can contribute.
I’ve also added a project idea to the wiki, based on this idea. As a conceptual taster for how useful it might be to have a browseable overview of government activities (which you can control / explore and then use to find a pathway to web-based material that interests you) I made this Wordle tagcloud using the latest Administrative Arrangements Orders:
Even a static bundle of words gives you a sense of the range of activities the government is involved in.
Whether or not this idea takes off, I’m excited about being involved in this event. Hope to meet you there!
This week I’ve invested some time in thinking about time and how to spend it well. I was prompted by someone dear to me, who is currently challenged by a peculiar combination of:
His disruptive schedule (1) creates a general condition of restlessness, which amplifies the effect of his natural aversion (2), causing certain kinds of work to pile up even more than they otherwise might. Both of those factors then work to increase his hankering (3) because the general restlessness and the agitation – of knowing there is a pile of work looming ever larger – join forces to thwart the creative impulse. Which in turn exacerbates the restlessness and agitation. It’s a vicious circle of joyless dissatisfaction.
To solve the angry jellyfish dilemma, we have devised a simple, twofold plan:
Below is the first-draft timetable, made in InDesign. I couldn’t find a template to start from, so for anyone else who might use it, here is the timetable template – 450kb zip file of an InDesign template. (And if someone out there can tell me how to get a full choice of colours in the fill for the table cell style, rather than be limited to a range of about 5 CMYK colours, I’d be grateful! Flip, maybe I should have made it in Graffle.)
The timetable seems to be helping already, to reveal the time that is there for the things that need doing; so he can see how to get them done. So, hooray. Maybe I should have called this post ‘How a timetable can soothe an angry jellyfish’.
Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere forum this week was exciting, not least because amongst all the compelling presentations, the Government 2.0 Taskforce was announced. Its role is not only to help the government navigate into the future of greater transparency and collaboration, but also to fund projects to the same end. So what might the taskforce fund? Well, here’s an idea, and a fairly fundamental, simple one at that.
Last night I watched Us Now, a film that makes a great case for how a distributed, collaborative approach can trump a top-down approach in ventures ranging from commercial money-lending to selecting players for a football team to allocating government funds. (An aside: I was struck by how accepting the model railway guys were of the crowd-sourced decision, even though it denied them any council funding. As one of them said – I’m paraphrasing – he had had his eyes opened up to all the other worthy projects, and he was satisfied that the process had been fair. Key point: transparent, collaborative decision-making is satisfying, even when you don’t get what you want.)
Because there seem to be so many areas of government policy and service that might be improved by some citizen collaboration, I started to wonder where those possibilities end. What are the limits to Government 2.0? Of course, the best way to answer that question would be to ask the people. What do you want a say in? And how?
For me, there are many potential points of intervention. My first thoughts are rather trivial – we could ban sticky labels on fruit! And rid the country of those horrid robo-loos that have taken over where public toilets used to be. But I’d also appreciate a say in more serious and complex things like immigration policy, climate change targets, and so on. No doubt there would be many other issues that I’d like to vote on, if I was offered the choice. The tricky part is knowing all the options – being aware of all the ways in which governments shape our environments, cultures and experiences.
The thing is, in order for people to answer the question ‘What do you want a say in?’ – in order for us to collectively determine the scope and limits of citizen governance – we need to be able to peruse the full set of government functions – at federal, state and local levels.
What we need is a visualisation – a view that shows us government functions as a whole and enables us to explore the component parts. Then, we could add an architecture of participation – put it to users as to what issues should be put to the people.
Actually, such a tool could be multi-purpose. Imagine if, having found a function of interest, you could see which level of government performs that function, and which agency, and how to get in touch with that agency. For me, a browsable visualisation of Australian governments has greater potential value as a directory than any ‘enhanced’ australia.gov.au search service.
How the architecture of this model of citizen governance might work is of course open, but the way forward for the visualisation part of this project seems obvious. A starting point, at least in relation to the federal government, would certainly be information from the National Archives, which has a key role in keeping governments accountable – by keeping their records – and which therefore takes a lead role in keeping government information organised. For example, it:
So, how about it? Do you share my sense that making the functions visible is a critical first step toward Government 2.0?
Yesterday I went to Dr Mitchell Whitelaw’s impressive presentation at the National Archives, about his Visible Archive project.
First, he gave a great introduction to why visualisations are important and how they can help you get a handle on a collection. In brief, search excels when you know which small piece you’re looking for. But if you want to explore the whole, you need another way in. Visualisations are great because by looking, we can find patterns and therefore intrinsic structures, which help us to make sense of and thereby navigate within large data sets.
Look at this beautiful visualisation of all the series in the Archives:
65k archival series – a big border => physically large; a big interior square => a lot of registered items
In the interactive version, you can click on any series and see the agencies that created or controlled it, and the other series to which it relates – eg an index to the series, or a successive series:
Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series
When you highlight one of the agencies, in this case CA5, the orange squares also indicate all the other series that that agency created.
Ah, the beauty of the series system! As Ross Gibbs, Director-General of the National Archives, said at the end of the presentation, Peter Scott would be elated.
But wait, there was more. Mitchell then showed us a deceptively simple visualisation of a single series, A1. It started with a tag cloud of the 150 most common words in the titles if items. ‘Naturalisation’ and ‘certificate’ were huge, and there were a lot of names, of places like Norfolk and Papua but also of people.
On hover you could see the spread of each term in items over time, and on click you could see a list of items. Then, if the item was digitised you could also have a look at each folio. Nice!
But the zing was yet to come. You can also combine two terms, or exclude one (eg, what is there in that series apart from all those naturalisation files? And in this way you could start to make discoveries, just by playing around with the tag cloud – for example, that there was a major cyclone in Darwin in 1937.
In so many ways, visualisation works as a way in to the records. We can’t predict all the ways that it works until we see them working. But sure as eggs there will be ways, not least because the national archives data has an in-built structure.
Thanks Mitchell ! for doing this great work and for making it look effortless. (I know it’s not!)
For some time now an idea has been simmering in the back of my mind. It comes from a gap I’ve noticed in the flourishing world of online tools. What I’d like is to be able to assemble data – images, text passages, PDFs, audio, video, whatever, and whether I’ve found them on the internet or uploaded them from my own machine – into a visual array, describe each item and identify how they relate to one another.
I know there is a plethora of ‘mindmapping’ tools out there, which vaguely resemble what I want. But such tools tend to be for the purpose of managing projects, or organising thoughts. They arrange ideas but they don’t actually compile *stuff*. And they tend to make a flat, static image, whose structure is often superficial.
I want to be able to make a dynamic presentation, which embeds the resources it depicts, and which allows you to see the whole and explore its parts. I see this tool as enabling you to do something in between Zotero – for compiling and tracking resources – and ManyEyes – for auto-building visualisations of pre-existing data sets. It would enable the manual assembly of resources into a non-linear, structured, dynamic visual array.
Once created, you could hover and/or click to see details of each item and the relationships between them. What type of relationship is it? And what is its character?
So. Does such a tool exist? If not, how can I make it so? Please advise!
Funnily enough… I was about to publish this post when I thought I’d have one last mozy around the web and lo, I discovered VUE – Visual Understanding Environment. It looks pretty good! I will endeavour to explore it… and return to report.
As an editor of archival websites, I’m interested in the tools available for historical publishing, research and interpretation. And the advent of Web 2.0 means that such tools are proliferating and becoming easier and more fun to use. Social software is making search interfaces more intuitive and clever; it is making publishing dialogic – readers can also be writers; and it is enabling many new kinds of collaborations to occur in interpreting collections.
Last month I addressed a small group at the Australian Historical Association conference in Canberra on this topic of How Web 2.0 will change history – possible futures for websites of the National Archives of Australia (PDF 312kb). The paper was framed by this mindmap I made
(inspired by other mindmaps on Web 2.0, like the one on Wikipedia).
There are plenty of exciting things the National Archives of Australia could do with these technologies, and it is starting to happen, but the path is long, resources are limited, and in some ways a cultural shift is necessary – it does not come naturally for a cultural institution to radically trust its audience.* So the paper is a bit imagin-ary. But didn’t Einstein say that imagination is more important than knowledge?
* Deep bow here to the Powerhouse Museum and its new collection interface, which you can read more about on the fresh + new blog.
