tl;dr I'm campaigning to iterate the service standard to include a duty to consult civil society in the service assessment process. I have some reasons, I think you should think about them.
One of the things at the heart of the success of early parts of the UK government's "digital transformation" (whatever that means any more) was bringing in people who understood technology outside of government. Look at this Actual Government Blog celebrating and inviting people to an open meeting with people inside and outside government talking https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2011/09/05/teacamp-september-2011-open-knowledge-foundation-and-scraperwiki/. This doesn't happen today. Meet-ups are often closed "communities of practice" accessible only to people with .gov.uk email addresses who already know someone to invite them and organised by community managers who, in the past, have been laid off because managers don't understand the point of what they do. People who criticise government are not welcomed. People who hold government accountable from the position of respectable institutions are held at arms length. The doors to government are closed.
The list of attendees in that blog is interesting in comparison. Plenty of people from inside GDS and from civic tech aligned groups, and some who are just "internet people". People like Blaine have their own stories of telling government CTOs what is and isn't possible, I remember a story of someone in DWP telling him that a certain number of concurrent users on an online service would be "impossible" (as an intended shut-down to building online benefits services) and him pointing out how many people were concurrently using Twitter (that he had been CTO of) at that moment.
I'd like to try and articulate a different version of that problem. In the first example, new technology was dismissed out of hand because it hadn't happened in government before. I think, in the epistemology (rules for deciding what is "true") of government, certain types of evidence are privileged in a way that creates a "government reality". By this, I mean that you could well encounter a situation where a government is elected with a manifesto commitment that is... not finished as a policy. Civil servants try and implement it, but it doesn't work. The policy is "policy" in the sense of feeling unchangeable. But, if we take politicians at their word then what they want is a good outcome that matches their goals rather than faithful reproduction of unworkable structures in the face of evidence.
I'm not harking back to mythical Good Old Days. Things move on, and to be fair, a huge amount of that is good. But it is hard to deny that government is struggling with legitimacy. Ministers do not answer questions in Parliament if the answers would be politically damaging. FOIs are routinely left unanswered. Data that can help us understand and hold government accountable is published erratically and poorly. Parts of government that used to thrive on external challenge and review have become more insular and risk becoming isolated.
There are all sorts of discussions to be had about what "holding government to account" looks like and whose job and what mechanisms to use. However, one layer that has traditionally been employed is the soft power of civil society. Often they are experts in a particular policy domain. They may be delivering services or have regular contact with citizens as part of their business. They are unlikely to share in any politically constructed reality problems.
Government is also committed to open government principles. It was a founding member of the Open Government Partnership and is currently in administrative review for repeated non-compliance with principles of timeliness and involving the public. Ministers and officials have voiced a wish to repair this position. I have a suggestion.
Over the last decade, we have seen the government service standard grow from a best practice checklist to a set of rules for delivering government services. It is a test, it is examined. Services that don't meet the standard have to have a really bloody good reason to go forward.
So, I'm proposing involving civil society in service assessments. As a point on the service standard, that discoveries need to have included a set of sector interviews and that a civil society panelist should be invited to service assessments and be invited to write an unredactable contribution to assessment reports from discovery through to live.
This would serve three purposes:
I’m putting this forward as part of the OGP national action plan. It is a two year cycle of commitments that government makes towards openness. It is a deeply flawed and imperfect process, but it is one of the only spaces where you get to bring your shopping list to Whitehall and see what’s affordable.