Sutton Bookshare is a project that I’ve been designing for Sutton Council. It’s a website that lets local residents list their books on a website and then share with each other.

Bookshare is part of a wider project called Sutton Open Library that’s about opening up the library service to innovation. The whole project is funded through a grant from NESTA (a charity distributing lottery money) under their Make It Local funding scheme.

As well as the book sharing website, Sutton Open Library also opens up the main library service’s database so that independent software developers can access it and build their own apps for it.

Is Sutton Bookshare an attempt to cover for library cutbacks?

Many people have asked this question. It’s a fair question to ask.

While I work temporarily as a contractor for Sutton Council I do not speak for the council. So these are my personal views.

It would be very hard to see how Sutton Bookshare could substitute for any significant part of the library service. It has certainly not been designed with that aim in mind. In fact, the whole design direction of the project has been led by the principle that Sutton Bookshare is not a library. Every time I start transplanting library concepts into Bookshare I remind myself that Bookshare is unique and different and needs to work in a very distinct way.

One of the aims of Sutton Bookshare has been to make books that aren’t available in the library available for people to borrow. Most of my own books aren’t in the library service, so if you’re interested in design theory, urbanism and software development you now have access to books that you didn’t have previously.

Another aim of Sutton Bookshare is to build and reinforce personal relationships and social networks. Libraries can do this to an extent through clubs and other activities but the core library services are about borrowing items from the library, not other people. When you lend or borrow something in Sutton Bookshare you don’t just exchange a book, you get to meet someone who lives or works locally and almost by definition has a shared interest with you.

Sutton Bookshare also improves the library service. When you look at the page for a book in Bookshare you get a direct link to that book’s page on the main library service’s catalogue. This gives you options: Borrow it in Bookshare or borrow it from the library. For many people it will be more convenient to borrow it from the library. Bookshare provides another way to find books that are in the main library service.

What Sutton Bookshare doesn’t do

Sutton Bookshare isn’t a library.

Bookshare only lets you borrow books, hence the name. No CDs or DVDs.

Bookshare doesn’t give you a desk where you can sit down and work for a few hours in a quiet atmosphere.

Bookshare won’t let you catch up on the day’s newspapers or recent magazines.

You can borrow my books but you can’t pitch up in my living room for the afternoon. Sorry about that.

Open data makes the libraries better

The open data side of the Sutton Open Library project is all about improving the library service. We’re doing this by giving software developers the opportunity to build apps that help people find books more easily. This is nothing to do with cutting back the library service. It’s about making the library service better. Sutton Council has been fortunate to be able to attract outside funding for this work that will not just pay off in Sutton but will help to set standards and make similar work easier in other councils.

All software developed under this project is free and open source. Anyone can use or modify it themselves for any purpose. The code is here on Github.

So what about the cutbacks then?

Like all councils, Sutton Council is reviewing its services in the light of funding cuts from central government. This includes the library service. If you’re a local resident and you want to get involved in the discussions about the future of the library service you can start here on the Speak Out Sutton website, the council’s consultation site. I have no more information about this process or influence on it than any other local resident.

But it’s my view that the scale and nature of Sutton Bookshare makes it a useful supplement for the library service but not a substitute for any part of it. My hope is that Bookshare becomes a useful thing in its own right. It’s more like a club than a public service, albeit one that’s organised by the council rather than independently. I also hope that the open data work on this project will make libraries more accessibile than they are at the moment.

A postscript for Amanda Craig

I’ve just listened to the discussion on BBC Radio 4′s PM programme with Sutton Council’s Daniel Ratchford and the author Amanda Craig.

Amanda seems to hold some odd views about books.

The first is that books are far too precious to lend. While I’d agree that books are definitely valuable in the sense that they’re useful and enjoyable, they don’t do any good sitting on your shelves. So I’ve listed 130 of my own books and while I’d definitely like them back, if I lose the occasional one then I can stand the loss. I offer things to share because I know that most people are honest and responsible. If you believed otherwise you probably wouldn’t engage in almost any kind of relationship, personal or commercial.

Amanda also thinks that sharing books is tantamount to stealing from authors. This is because when you borrow a book from a library the author gets a small payment (the Public Lending Right) but when you share a book with a friend the author gets nothing.

I think this is terribly narrow-minded.

Sharing books on a relatively small scale doesn’t threaten authors. People stopping reading books threatens authors. Sutton Bookshare is a small project that in its own way will help people discover and read new books. Authors will benefit because those same people will be far more likely to visit a public library or buy books subsequently. It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that someone might borrow one book by an author on Bookshare and then buy another.

When you’re looking at a book page on Sutton Bookshare you’re also three clicks away from buying that book on Amazon. Bookshare links directly to Amazon’s search for that book.

The threat to authors comes largely from other things. It comes from the time people choose to spend doing things other than reading books because they now have more options. Watch YouTube or read? Fool around on Facebook or read? Play computer games or read? Listen to internet radio or read?

A project like Sutton Bookshare and Sutton Open Library is the wrong target. We’re getting people hooked on books not taking money out of authors’ pockets. Authors, libraries and of course readers will benefit.

I’ve always spent a lot of money on books. I probably always will because it’s very unlikely to be convenient or even possible for me to get all the books I want through borrowing from people or libraries. Authors should be scared of Facebook and World of Warcraft not book sharing.

Walsall Council tweeted their activity for 24 hours on 4-5 March using the #walsall24 hashtag. Here are my responses to points made in a discussion on a Guardian article about this project. The whole discussion thread from the Guardian was subsequently deleted for unknown reasons.

Many of the tweets are trivial and banal (Atomant77)

Taken out of context, just about everything is trivial and banal. The time of the next bus from here to the town centre is trivial and banal unless you’re here and you want to get to the town centre.

But that’s what happens when you release comprehensive information about something. Most of it isn’t of interest to most people. Conversely, there tends to be something for everyone. Just look at the Freedom of Information requests that people make.

I don’t live in Walsall but I was very interested to see that there was a clairvoyant appearing at a council library to teach Tarot. As a rationalist, I don’t think this is the kind of thing councils should be subsiding. Does it happen in my area, too? It turns out that it does. I’ll be following this one up.

When you’ve got information on a computer you can slice and dice it any way you like. Cut through the mass of information you don’t care about to find what you do.

Twitter isn’t a good medium for reaching Walsall’s residents. It’s just for the “chattering classes”. What about my 85-year-old gran? (liberalcynic)

As Chuffy and HenryHomer said, this is an experiment. It’s not a new council service and they won’t be doing this every day.

If councils are going to improve their services over the long term they need to experiment with new ideas. This doesn’t mean committing massive resources to untested ideas. It means doing exactly what Walsall is doing here: Short, one-off projects that are cheap and have no adverse impact on other services.

You don’t have to have a very long memory to remember when councils didn’t have websites. And if you remember that, you’ll probably also remember the people who were resistant to councils having websites. The internet was just for geeks and the chattering classes, they said. Well, look at it now. No, we still don’t have everyone online (nor equally good access for those that have it) but I hope no-one seriously still thinks that the web is a waste of time.

With half the country now on Facebook, councils learning how to use social media looks pretty important, not only because there’s already a huge audience there but because most of the other half will follow soon enough.

More generally, this project is about capturing and disseminating information. Just because it passes through a computer doesn’t mean that it’ll necessarily be consumed on one. Web pages can be printed out. So can RSS feeds. Data feeds can be displayed on public screens like the countdown boards at bus stops and train stations. Software can send out text messages that can reach just about everyone. I’m looking at #walsall24 and thinking, “How could we automate this? What else could this approach be used for?” I see nothing wrong with Walsall blazing the trail here for others as well as themselves. Everything has to start somewhere.

Walsall’s Twitter experiment is a drop in the ocean, but reminding people of all the shitty stuff that councils do is no bad thing. (Chuffy)

… and …

It’s just a shallow PR exercise to make the council look good (liberalcynic)

It may have “image” benefits in a PR-sense but I think this is more about engagement than self-promotion.

Many people missed the point of #gmp24, which as I remember it was to show people how much time Greater Manchester Police spent doing “social work” rather than fighting crime. It wasn’t so much “see how wonderful we are” as “see how our time gets wasted”. They wanted people to think about the role of the police and how it could best serve the community rather than affirm what a great organisation they were. What Walsall is doing with #walsall24 seems similar to that aim.

In my view, esteem has to be earned. If proper communication helps services to be accessible, efficient and popular, then esteem for the council will surely rise. (liberalcynic)

I take this point entirely. Councils should be engaging with residents and making themselves accountable to them rather than bigging themselves up. #walsall24 certainly couldn’t be rolled out as it is as a regular council service, but I’ll definitely be trying to think of ways in which some of the ideas could be applied to realise tangible benefits at a sustainable cost. Birmingham’s civic dashboard is taking steps in that direction and I expect to see far more realtime, fine-grained information being made available by councils and used across many media.

It’s always good when open data makes the headlines, albeit slightly for the wrong reasons today. Nonetheless, too much traffic to our website is a problem we’d all like to have. It shows public interest if nothing else. After all, who wouldn’t want an easy way to find out how much crime is on their street and in their neighbourhood?

But before we fall over ourselves to be grateful for this latest attempt at transparency we should exercise more than a little caution.

This won’t be news to anyone who thinks seriously about data, but a map is a visualisation, not the data itself. It’s one way of representing the underlying data. In as much as the data is accurate, complete and relevant, the police.uk website is simply giving us a single way to look at it that’s already been decided for us. No matter how often we’re reminded that the map is not the territory (and let’s be honest, most people have never heard that saying, let alone considered the issues in any depth), if you’ve only got the map it might as well be the territory. Psychologically, the two become conflated.

Perhaps apocryphally, Stalin said that it’s not who votes that counts but who counts the votes. Likewise, we should be hugely cautious about giving too much weight to official visualisations of data. As the policing minister Nick Herbert wrote today (my emphasis):

We live in the age of accountability and transparency. The public deserve to know what is happening on their streets, and they want action. By opening up this information, and allowing the public to elect Police and Crime Commissioners, we are giving people real power – and strengthening the fight against crime.

So what we’re looking at here isn’t a value-neutral scientific exercise in helping people to live their daily lives a little more easily, it’s an explicitly political attempt to shape the terms of a debate around the most fundamental changes in British policing in our lifetimes.

Transparency isn’t wrong. It’s absolutely vital to make a meaningful contribution to public debate, but we need to distinguish pseudo-transparency from the real thing. Spatial visualisation and analysis is enormously difficult to get right and even thoughtfully-designed visualisations require a fair bit of understanding to interpret correctly. Slap it on a map works fine when you just want to see where your local recycling centres are, but as soon as you start to classify crimes by type and bound them into streets and neighbourhoods you’re into the realm of professional spatial analysis. You need to know what you’re doing and have access to tools that enable you to shift category and spatial boundaries to account for anomalous effects. The newspapers that have run lists of the most crime-ridden streets in the country today might want to consider the fact that longer streets will on average have more crime than shorter streets, just to take one simple example of a relevant factor that’s not accounted for if you want to visualise this data in that way.

Whether police.uk is trying to pull a fast one on us or is simply naive about the possibilities for doing something meaningful for a general audience with this data, the result is the same: plenty of heat and very little light. Mark Monmonier’s How to lie with maps provides a good starter text for the myriad ways in which maps can deceive, intentionally and otherwise.

On a more positive note, we’re also getting the data itself to use. This is a good thing, in as much as the data itself is, as stated above, accurate, complete and relevant. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s derived data that’s already been classified, rounded and lumped together in various ways, with a bit of location anonymising thrown in for good measure. I haven’t had a detailed look at it yet but I would caution against trying to use it for anything serious. A whole set of decisions have already transformed the raw source data (individual crime reports) into this derived dataset and you can’t undo them. You’ll just have to work within those decisions and stay extremely conscious that everything you produce with it will be prefixed, “as far as we can tell”.

£300K for this? There ought to be a law against it. Worse than useless, it’s thoroughly misleading. In future, we need fine-grained datasets for these kinds of applications and a big head start (six months?) between publishing official data and the commissioning of official expensive projects around it to ensure that everyone really understands what can and should be done with it.

There are five types of potential users for open data and data-driven apps:

1. data experts and computer scientists who can use semantic web technologies;
2. software developers who can use XML, JSON, etc.;
3. power users who can use CSV, spreadsheets, RSS, KML/Google Earth, perhaps Yahoo Pipes;
4. general users who can use a web browser;
5. offliners who need printed materials, ambient displays, public screens etc.

Most of the focus seems to be on providing data for data experts and developers so they can build apps for general users and power users. We need more data suitable for power users to use directly and more apps for offliners. We’re all offline sometimes.

My own app for offliners is QR Code Posters which will print a poster from any RSS feed. See how it can be used here.

Sutton Open Maps caters for general users, power users and developers by showing draggable Google Maps of local features along with KML (Google Earth), XML and JSON downloads on the same page. Whether you want to just find a local recycling centre, download the data into Google Earth for a school project or build your own app from the data, you’re covered. (It’s open source, too.)

This post started life as a comment.

I’m a big fan of London’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme. I praised it when it was introduced, I created a free API service for developers to help them get live data about bike availability to make useful apps for people, I built a realtime 3D visualisation of bike availability and I even wrote a simulator to help me better understand bike movement patterns. I still think it’s a great system and I’m keen to do what I can to help people use it and to make it work better.

So when Boris announced that the scheme had just passed its one millionth journey milestone it seemed like a good time to ask Transport for London for the journey data. It’s an easy enough job: Just a single database query to fetch the times, origin and destination of each trip. If I could load this data into my simulator I might be able to see where extra bikes and docking stations might be needed. I put in a Freedom of Information Act request, confident that I’d have the data within the 20 working days limit required by law.

That was three months ago on 8 October. I’m still waiting.

The good news is that the data has just been made available in TfL’s developers’ area and some people are already starting to do interesting and useful things with it. But behind that happy fact is another example of a public body deciding to completely ignore their Freedom of Information Act responsibilities and the rights of an applicant in pursuit of its own perceived interests.

Data delayed is data denied

Under the law, public bodies have got 20 working days to reply either with the information requested or to claim an exemption. The time limit is there for a good and obvious reason: Without it, public bodies can string an applicant along indefinitely, and with many requests being time-sensitive this can often past the point where the information would be useful.

Fortunately I didn’t have a specific deadline for using this data but it certainly would have been more useful to me sooner rather than later. I could have been working on it for two months by now. And if TfL had been keen for other developers to use it, they could have had it too. Some developers were keen to get hold of it for the Open Data Hackday on 4 December last year but that came and went without any sign of the data.

So why was the data delayed? I estimate that there would have been less than two hours work to produce it and send it to me, or to put it on an open website where anyone could download the file.

“Your free information is in this locked box. Sign this contract and if we like what you’re doing you can have it.”

The answer lies in TfL’s desire to wrap the data in a complicated contract rather than make it available to me or anyone else directly and legally unencumbered. This might make sense in the context of some data and some data users but it’s directly inimical to the aims and indeed the law of freedom of information. The data in TfL’s developers’ area isn’t open data and it’s not available to everyone. As the site says:

Please complete the registration form below to use our syndication feeds. Before we give permission to use any feeds, we need to know how they will be used, where they will be used and how many people are likely to view them.

So why should anyone have to apply for permission to get access to their freedom of information answer? Why not just send it to the applicant?

The Information Commissioner, who regulates public bodies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act is quite clear that information must be supplied regardless of the identity and motives of the applicant. His guidance (PDF) states:

A request therefore has to be considered on the basis that it could have been made by any person; the identity of that person is not a material consideration when deciding whether or not to release information. It is for this reason that we do recommend as good practice that requests under obvious pseudonyms should normally be considered unless there is reason to think that any of the matters below need to be taken into account.

There follows some general exceptions regarding vexatious requests, people requesting their own personal information and costs issues, none of which apply in this case.

On the issue of the applicant’s motives:

There is also no specific reference in the FOIA to the principle that requests for information must be considered without reference to the motives of the requester.

However, there are no references in the Act indicating that anyone can be asked to provide a reason for requesting information and it is from this absence that the principle [of disregarding the applicant's motives] is drawn.

The Information Commissioner then quotes the Lord Chancellor’s code of practice on freedom of information:

Authorities should be aware that the aim of providing assistance is to clarify the nature of the information sought, not to determine the aims or motivation of the applicant. Care should be taken not to give the applicant the impression that he or she is obliged to disclose the nature of his or her interest as a precondition to exercising the rights of access, or that he or she will be treated differently if he or she does (or does not).

But if I want to get a response to my FOI request from TfL I am asked to enter into a contract with them whose terms include:

2.1.2 [You shall] only use the Transport Data in accordance with these Terms and Conditions and the Syndication Developer Guidelines, and not use such information in any way that causes detriment to TfL or brings TfL into disrepute. The rights granted to You under these Terms and Conditions are limited to accessing and displaying or otherwise making available the Transport Data for the purposes stated by You in Your registration.

So not only is TfL’s contract explicitly asking me to state my motive as a precondition of access, it also constrains me from using the information for any other purpose and arguably prevents me from using that information to criticise TfL, thereby causing it “detriment” or bringing it into “disrepute”. If I don’t agree to this they can deny access altogether and if I subsequently break the agreement in their view they can revoke access. This is a funny kind of free information.

The Freedom of Information Act is designed to enable scrutiny of government. It’s inevitable that some information requested may cause embarrassment to the public body providing it or even bring it into disrepute. If the law is going to be workable at all, public bodies must consider each application on its merits alone without concerning themselves with the applicant or their motives. To do otherwise would allow public bodies to effectively pick and choose which requests they answered. TfL’s decision to require me to enter into an extremely restrictive contract with them to get a response to my freedom of information request is applicant and motive discrimination by the back door. It’s not something that should be tolerated from TfL much less adopted by other public bodies as a way to weaken FOI applicants’ rights. Free information should not come wrapped in a restrictive contract wall. That’s why I won’t be accepting TfL’s terms and I’ll simply have to leave the analysis of this Cycle Hire data in the very capable hands of others.

I’m on The Report today talking about dodgy statistics and electoral malpractice.

The Report, BBC Radio 4, 9 December 2010

Reporter Simon Cox asks how unique the circumstances of the Oldham East election were. Phil Woolas was found guilty of making claims about his opponent’s personal character or conduct that he knew to be untrue. But candidates can use many other tricks to deceive voters that are within the rules. The Report asks whether the law that was used to strip the former Oldham East MP of his seat has kept up with the reality of modern electioneering.

ElectionLeaflets.org (formerly The Straight Choice)

Roger Godsiff’s leaflet (Labour, Birmingham Hall Green)

My posts on this subject:

How to lie with statistics, Liberal Democrat style (John Dixon’s leaflet in Cardiff North) 27 April 2010

Lib Dems’ leaflets: Legal, indecent, dishonest, untruthful 4 June 2009

With lies like these I’d rather the Lib Dems fiddled their expenses 15 May 2009

Social network site Twitter, which is increasingly landing its users in legal difficulties for posting foolish remarks, may soon claim another victim.

With a bit of luck, eh? Given that you’re the first journalist to draw attention to Sarah Baskerville we could be forgiven for thinking you’re trying to make the news rather than report it.

A Whitehall official has been Tweeting about her drunkenness, boasting about how pointless she thinks some of her work is and how much she dislikes the Government’s deficit reduction.

This is heinous. Clearly, civil servants:

• shouldn’t get drunk
• should regard every single moment of their work lives as worthwhile and necessary
• should support every government policy without equivocation while simultaneously remaining politically neutral

When I rang her department yesterday to tell them, there was a cold pause before someone promised to ‘get back’ to me. He never did.

They were busy responding to journalists about serious, policy-related stories.

Civil servants used to try to be impartial and discreet. Not so Sarah Baskerville, ‘Team Leader in Corporate Finance Systems and Reporting Solutions’ (what a title!) at the Department of Transport.

What a title, indeed! If you’d bothered to read the rest of her CV on LinkedIn (since deleted) you might get some grasp of what she does for a living and how it contributes to society.

Ms Baskerville, aka ‘Baskers’, is an incorrigible contributor to the internet. She belongs to numerous networking sites.

Delivered in tones that can only make one think that you regard contributing to the internet and membership of social networking sites a bad thing. In 2010, this gets you hired, not fired.

In the middle of a management course — paid for by us taxpayers to help her do her job better — she posted a Tweet promoting a Labour MP’s attack on Downing Street ‘spin’. She later described the person who was taking the course as ‘mental’.

Charming.

Perhaps the course was actually a waste of her time and our money.

Before the government cuts were announced to Parliament, Ms Baskerville was Tweeting about meetings concerning the fate of staff about to be displaced.

Not far short of treason, I reckon. Have they got any spare cells at Holloway?

All this was done, it should be stressed, under her own name, with easy links to her workplace. She publishes photos of herself, too. Are there not some security issues here?

So what are the security implications of the public knowing the name and likeness of a middle-ranking financial reporting professional in the Department for Transport?

Anyone? Bueller?

But here’s a test. Say you do discover some sensitive government information online that you think shouldn’t be there. Do you:

• inform the relevant authorities discreetly?
• copy and paste it into your national newspaper column?

No conferring, now.

‘Stuggling with wine-induced hangover,’ she Tweeted from work one day. There have been frequent references to her over-imbibing.

A Google search for ‘”quentin letts” cunt’ turns up over 1400 results. How about that for “frequent references”?

Another day, shortly before the Comprehensive Spending Review, she complained after lunch about feeling ‘rather tired — would much prefer going home’.

Whereas she should have been performing star jumps while belting out Land of Hope and Glory and simultaneously managing her team.

If she only spent her office hours working rather than Tweeting, she would no doubt be even more exhausted.

So she doesn’t spend her office hours working? She’s a slacker? If that’s not true it’s probably libel. I trust you’ve done due diligence on her work performance?

Her outpourings have included a complaining reference to Tory MP Douglas Carswell, a prominent critic of Whitehall waste.

The content of which is presumably too anodyne to report even in this barrel-scraping exercise.

She claims to be an acquaintance of Sally Bercow, Labour-supporting wife of the supposedly impartial Commons Speaker. In one Tweet she looked forward to meeting Mrs Bercow for ‘another coffee/muffin session, just so that I can laugh at your lack of apps on the iPhone’.

She has friends in the Labour Party? At last, the smoking gun!

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond is one of the more serious members of the Cabinet. He is unlikely to be enchanted by Ms Baskerville or her witterings.

As “one of the more serious members of the cabinet”, I imagine the only question he’s going to be bothered with is, “Does she do a good job?”

By all means, Quentin, tackle that point with your customary rigour in your next column.

Reference: Quentin Letts, Oh please, stop this twit from Tweeting, someone, Daily Mail 13 November 2010