The traditional Shakespearean line

He gets off to a cracking start, Shakespeare. The cure for cancer. And happy children:

Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs.

That's Stephan Shakespeare, not the other one, and he's chatting about Phase 2 of the web revolution on p.5 of An Independent Review of Public Sector Information. "The size and coherence of our public sector", he says, "combined with government’s strong commitment to a visionary open data policy means that we have the opportunity to be world leaders in the enlightened use of data". "Strong"? "Visionary"? "Enlightened"? "World leaders"? Flattery?

Some of us remember the 1970s and the invention of the computerised management information system, MIS, which became a decision support system in the 1980s, DSS.

But that's just its age in the benighted computer world. The discovery that you need data to make decisions is a lot older than that – isn't there a bell ringing somewhere at the back of your ur-memory, recalling the first vizier telling an early Ptolemy that collecting a few facts might be a good idea, before risking life and limb running up a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? And the pharaoh's ageless response?

Is you-need-facts-to-make-a-decision the most frequently re-discovered nostrum in history? (No. "Ne'er cast a clout till May is out". Ed)

Any salesman hawking his wares with this tediously familiar and groan-inducing line had better have a breathtakingly convincing story to tell.

Does he? Stephan Shakespeare – what is his story?

Is he promising to find the cure for cancer? No. Is he promising that your children will be happy? No. What about apple pie – golden brown pastry every time? No.

His story is purely speculative. Government, he says on p.5, "has a strong institutional tendency to proceed by hunch, or prejudice, or by the easy option". That is an exact description of the way Shakespeare is proceeding.

"In our consultations", he says on p.11, consultations about public sector information (PSI) ...

... business has made clear that it is unwilling to invest in this field until there is more predictability in terms of supply of data. Therefore without greater clarity and commitment from government, we will fail to realise the growth opportunities from PSI.

Never mind government, we could do with a bit more clarity from Shakespeare:

• What are these "growth opportunities" he keeps banging on about?
• What is this "greater economic benefit" that we read about on p.14?
• "To promote and support a more beneficial economic model" there should be a review, Shakespeare says, of how organisations like Companies House, the Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey are "rewarded for their activities to stimulate innovation and growth" (also p.14). In what way is his "economic model" more "beneficial"? What "growth" will it "stimulate" and how?
• "Following 'best practice' guidelines should be enough, so long as we are willing to prosecute those who misuse personal data. Otherwise we will miss out on the enormous benefits of PSI", he says on p.15 but what "enormous benefits" is he talking about?
• "There is huge potential here for building social and economic value if we are willing to invest smartly" (p.16). That doesn't become true simply by repeating it. What is this "huge potential"? How much "social and economic value"?

Shakespeare is threatening the country with missing a great opportunity but he doesn't tell us what it is.

We've been here before. 293 years ago, to be precise, in 1720 when, according to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS):

A company was promoted “For carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is”. After receiving £2,000 from subscribers the promoter emigrated.

And more recently, last month, April 2013, when Mr James McCormick was found guilty of selling novelty golf ball finders as bomb detection devices. They worked, he said, but he couldn't say how.

Shakespeare needs to tell us what the difference is between him and Mr McCormick and he needs to tell us what this "great advantage" is – "no-one to know what it is" is less than convincing.

Even less so when we read on p.15 that:

We cannot rely only on markets and government departments and wider public sector bodies to maximise the potential of this relatively new and fast-developing field in which we are positioned to be a world leader.

But these are precisely the parties he's told us we can rely on.

What's more, we already have thousands of researchers in the universities and in industry and in charitable foundations and in government doing precisely the job he is promoting. Does he think he's invented the idea of cancer research? What difference is he trying to make?

Apparently, not a lot (p.6):

This review does not call for any significant increase in spending on a national data strategy, nor any additional administrative complexity; rather, it calls for a broadening of objectives together with a sharpening of planning and controls.

How much "broader" can the "objectives" of the Office for National Statistics, for example, be? And what is a "sharpening of planning and controls" when it's at home?

We should look at new ways to gather evidence of the economic and social value of opening up PSI and government data ...

... he says on p.16. But surely his claim that "opening up PSI" will be of enormous "economic and social value" is based on evidence. Isn't it? He says not. Cart before the horse, he's had the idea and now he wants someone else to find the supporting evidence. No need to wait for the evidence, though, his hunch should become government policy immediately. A strange approach for a political pollster, which is what Shakespeare is.

(So strange that you have to wonder. Market research/political polling is normally very precise and very logical. All the results are strictly categorised and any inferences are made minutely carefully. Did Shakespeare write this absurd farrago of a report? Or was it Bacon?)

Currently we can measure the costs of producing and publishing data, but we have no model for evaluating the economic or social benefits 'downstream', and so we may be undervaluing these activities, leading to under-investment of resources. (also p.16)

What's happened to the "huge potential" he was so sure about, and the "enormous benefits of PSI" he was promising? They've just gone up in smoke. It was just a hunch all the time. Shakespeare doesn't even have a "model" for "evaluating" them.

You need facts, Shakespeare. Facts. To make a decision, you need facts. Everyone knows that. You haven't given us any. Cracking start. Poor follow-through. No cigar.

The traditional Shakespearean line

He gets off to a cracking start, Shakespeare. The cure for cancer. And happy children:

Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs.

That's Stephan Shakespeare, not the other one, and he's chatting about Phase 2 of the web revolution on p.5 of An Independent Review of Public Sector Information. "The size and coherence of our public sector", he says, "combined with government’s strong commitment to a visionary open data policy means that we have the opportunity to be world leaders in the enlightened use of data". "Strong"? "Visionary"? "Enlightened"? "World leaders"? Flattery?

Some of us remember the 1970s and the invention of the computerised management information system, MIS, which became a decision support system in the 1980s, DSS.

But that's just its age in the benighted computer world. The discovery that you need data to make decisions is a lot older than that – isn't there a bell ringing somewhere at the back of your ur-memory, recalling the first vizier telling an early Ptolemy that collecting a few facts might be a good idea, before risking life and limb running up a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? And the pharaoh's ageless response?

Is you-need-facts-to-make-a-decision the most frequently re-discovered nostrum in history? (No. "Ne'er cast a clout till May is out". Ed)

Shakespeare's take on property

Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of  YouGov, has published An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

His idea is that we can expand the economy and increase general wellbeing if a cadre of brilliant data scientists is given access to the huge amounts of public sector information (PSI) held by the UK government. He also has his sights set on our personal data – open that data to being processed, and intelligent lifestyle decisions can be made for us by apps.

Who does this data belong to?

Shakespeare is consistent – the data belongs to "the citizen", "the public", "citizens":

My recommendations fall into five basic themes ... defining the principles of ownership: it all belongs to the citizen, not to the government (p.6) We should remain firm in the principle that publicly-funded data belongs to the public (p.6) Simply put, the strategy is ... Recognise in all we do that PSI, and the raw data that creates it, was derived from citizens, by their own authority, was paid for by them, and is therefore owned by them. It is not owned by employees of the government. All questions of what to do with it should be dealt with by the principle of getting the greatest value back to citizens, with input not just from experts but also citizens and markets. This should be obvious, but the fact that it needs to be constantly reaffirmed is illustrated by the way that even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers, by commercial publishers, aided by university lethargy, and government reluctance to apply penalties; thereby obstructing scientific progress. (p.9) The strategy should explicitly embrace the idea that all PSI is derived from and paid for by the citizen and should therefore be considered as being owned by the citizen. It is the therefore the duty of government to make PSI as open as possible to create the maximum value to the nation. (p.11) Data that is derived from the activity of citizens must be seen as being at least co-owned by them and returning value to them, though the investment of business in collecting and processing the data should also be respected. There are government initiatives such as Midata, a government led project that works with businesses to give consumers better access to the electronic personal data that companies hold about them. The project recognises that data about citizens belongs to them and that they should have a way of claiming and using their ownership. Midata is currently about empowering consumers – government itself should explicitly embrace the Midata initiative to empower citizens by returning key data it holds on citizens back to them (pp.17-8)

Data is valuable. A business that takes that raw material and adds value to make a profit should pay for it. If they don't pay for it, then its ownership is being expropriated from the people it belongs to. We don't expect that. Most businesses pay for their raw materials. There is no reason to make an exception here.

The implication is clear. Any businesses which exploit the public's data should pay a licence to use it and/or they should pay a PSI tax (public sector information) and the licence fees and PSI tax payments collected by the Exchequer should be used to reduce personal income tax and employees' National Insurance payments.

Strikingly, that is not Shakespeare's conclusion. He says:

This data, to optimise its value to society, must be open, shareable and, where practical, it should be free (p.7) Some good progress has been made in opening up data for public sector sharing and reuse. But restrictive licensing, applied to key PSI, limits the opportunity for businesses, especially SMEs, to make effective use of PSI as an underpinning business resource. (p.13)

Shakespeare starts from an Obamaesque you-didn't-build-that-bridge position but finishes by expropriating the public because otherwise "businesses, especially SMEs" would have their opportunities limited.

He may be right. Even so, it's a remarkable change of direction during the exposition of his recommendations – one minute the data belongs to the public and next minute it doesn't.

Shakespeare's take on property

Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of  YouGov, has published An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

His idea is that we can expand the economy and increase general wellbeing if a cadre of brilliant data scientists is given access to the huge amounts of public sector information (PSI) held by the UK government. He also has his sights set on our personal data – open that data to being processed, and intelligent lifestyle decisions can be made for us by apps.

Who does this data belong to?

Shakespeare, Google and our new government

The world is now in the second phase of the web revolution. So says the political pollster Stephan Shakespeare in his report, An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

In Phase 1, the revolutionary winners – Shakespeare's Robespierre heroes listed on p.5 of his report – rose to the top on the basis of the unprecedented ease of communication between suppliers and consumers:

Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple – the companies through which our daily lives are run ...

Now we're in the next revolutionary phase, he says (also p.5):

Phase 2 sees an equivalent leap, this time in the capacity to process and learn from data. Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs. Data allows us to adapt and improve public services and businesses and enhance our whole way of life, bringing economic growth, wide-ranging social benefits and improvements in how government works.

Shakespeare's theme is that, if only they're given enough of our personal data, then intelligent scientists can run our daily lives for us even more intimately than in Phase 1, the quality of government will improve and, what's more, the economy will grow.

Before we consider those propositions, let's quickly remind ourselves about some of Shakespeare's heroes:

• Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Apple, et al, have, indeed, made a fortune and acquired enormous power often, it seems, beyond the reach of mere governments. That owes precisely nothing to Shakespeare or to the UK initiative he now advocates.
• Apple relies on a brilliant combination of slave labour in the third world and adolescent fashion-consciousness in the first. Their popularity survived not only the slave labour and the high prices they charge, but also the revelation that their iPhones track your every move.
• Enviably clever of them, PayPal act like a bank but they're not – most of the difficult know-your-customer work is done for them by real banks, on whose backs PayPal get a free ride, charging whatever commission and transaction fees they judge they can get away with.
• Amazon has built a quasi-monopoly and now chisels its suppliers' margins in the same way the UK supermarkets are always accused of impoverishing farmers. At the same time, Amazon has started increasing the commission it requires from traders who rely on its digital floorspace to sell their wares.
• That is common knowledge. Less widely appreciated is Amazon's dominant position in "cloud computing". Amazon Web Services already stores a lot of our data "in the cloud" where it is under their control, and seeks through predatory pricing to gain control of a lot more.
• Google and Facebook entered Phase 2 of the revolution years before Shakespeare drew our attention to it. They make their money by selling all the personal information we users of their services give them for free to marketing companies, see for example Martin Sorrell: if you don’t eat your children, someone else will. They are forever facing government enquiries in Europe and the US into their unsatisfactory privacy policies. You can get a hollow laugh out of the fact that they don't always understand those privacy policies themselves. But no other comfort.
• Google's wings were not even clipped when it was revealed that they had "accidentally" collected information about all our WiFi networks while filming the entire country for their StreetView product. This "accident" carried on for years, all over the world. The whole point about Google is that they don't make mistakes.
• Most of Shakespeare's heroes make microscopic corporation tax payments to the countries they profit from, see for example GDS and their friends, where there are 47 links for you to follow by way of evidence to support that statement.

"Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting ...". We may all join in Shakespeare's admiration of red-blooded capitalism in action. But in what way do these heroes – these latter-day pied pipers of Hamelin – demonstrate, as Shakespeare suggests, "improvements in how government works"?

Shakespeare, Google and our new government

The world is now in the second phase of the web revolution. So says the political pollster Stephan Shakespeare in his report, An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

In Phase 1, the revolutionary winners – Shakespeare's Robespierre heroes listed on p.5 of his report – rose to the top on the basis of the unprecedented ease of communication between suppliers and consumers:

Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple – the companies through which our daily lives are run ...

Now we're in the next revolutionary phase, he says (also p.5):

Phase 2 sees an equivalent leap, this time in the capacity to process and learn from data. Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs. Data allows us to adapt and improve public services and businesses and enhance our whole way of life, bringing economic growth, wide-ranging social benefits and improvements in how government works.

Shakespeare's theme is that, if only they're given enough of our personal data, then intelligent scientists can run our daily lives for us even more intimately than in Phase 1, the quality of government will improve and, what's more, the economy will grow.

Shakespeare – principles, statistics and mooncalves

He's a big topic, Shakespeare. You can't say everything about him that needs to be said in one post. But we have to start somewhere. With the foundations.

"In October 2012, I was invited by government to lead an independent review of Public Sector Information (PSI) to explore the growth opportunities of, and how to widen access to, the wealth of information held by the public sector." That's the "foundation", Mr Shakespeare says (p.3), of his latest diversion, An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

Born in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon Mönchengladbach, Stephan Shakespeare (né Kukowski), just making sure we've got the right Shakespeare, is the founder of YouGov, one of the polling organisations which have replaced political principle in the tragedy which is national debate in the UK with market research.

What we need, says Shakespeare, now Chair of the Data Strategy Board, on the basis of his review and of a report by the respected Constitutional experts, Deloitte ("Deloitte analysis quantifies the direct value of PSI at around £1.8bn with wider social and economic benefits taking that up to around £6.8bn"), is more data and more data scientists.

Why?

It's those shackles again.

Yes, it's another bloody revolution, "The Revolution, Phase 2: How Britain Can Be The Winner" (p.5):

If we play it right we can break free of the shackles of a low-growth economy in which government and the public sector are seen as a resource drag and an obstacle, and they instead become key drivers of a transforming process ... Ensuring that the process of government is optimised for progress, and does not corrupt into an obstacle to progress, requires continuous data and the continuous analysis of data.

It already has huge quantities of data, of course, so why does the state need even more? If the data the state already has isn't sufficient to turn it into a "key driver of a transforming process", what guarantee is there that even more data will achieve that transformation?

Is Mr Shakespeare any closer to answering those questions than one of the characters in his huge dramatis personae, Mr Stephen Childerstone?

A data-enabled online market place will create new services that will take your data and do some really interesting things with it.

What "new services" and what "really interesting things"?

Leave those questions hanging for the moment and let's move on.

Shakespeare complains that a lot of public sector information (PSI), is salted away in silos and needs to be consolidated and centralised in one place and, just for good measure, it needs to become real-time information (pp.7-8):

For instance, at the moment health data comes through a variety of unconnected channels and into many different silos. It is hard for researchers to gain access to its full value. Advances in technology not only now allow us to collect data at source in real time, but also enable more practical linkage and accessibility.

There could be good reasons for those silos, good reasons why the Constitution has evolved the way that it has in its fuddy-duddy principled old Darwinian way establishing legal barriers all over the place but, if you start like an intelligent designer or even a creationist, you won't see them. The good reasons. So they won't exist.

All you'll see is an unwelcome obstacle to the statistics you need to promote the quantified self space, the space inhabited by us mooncalves, the governed.

And that's the other thing Shakespeare needs. Not just breaking down the walls of the silos that warehouse weather data and the data on motorway traffic flow – recognisably public data – he needs more personal data to transform the government into a key driver of progress.

We mooncalves are so stupid. So uninformed. Which of us hasn't gone to bed, careworn, with the weight of human fallibility on our shoulders and woken up saying (p.7):

We should invest in developing real-time, scalable, machine-learning algorithms for the analysis of large data sets, to provide users with the information to understand their behaviour and make informed decisions.

And what does that imply for public sector information (PSI)?

Article E of Shakespeare's strategy says (p.10):

Privacy is of the utmost importance, and so is citizen benefit.

Phew. Our privacy is of the utmost importance.

But tarry. There are two quantities which are of the "utmost importance". There's "citizen benefit" as well. What happens if they conflict?

The answer is given in Article A (p.9):

Simply put, the strategy is: Recognise in all we do that PSI, and the raw data that creates it, was derived from citizens, by their own authority, was paid for by them, and is therefore owned by them. It is not owned by employees of the government. All questions of what to do with it should be dealt with by the principle of getting the greatest value back to citizens, with input not just from experts but also citizens and markets. This should be obvious, but the fact that it needs to be constantly reaffirmed is illustrated by the way that even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers, by commercial publishers, aided by university lethargy, and government reluctance to apply penalties; thereby obstructing scientific progress.

Many researchers? Commercial publishers? Lethargic universities? Reluctant governments? Get rid of the lot of them, along with the legal barriers, in the name of scientific progress. Your personal data belongs to citizens, not to you.

This is, as noted at the start, just the overture. The prelude. But there's Shakespeare's lesson #1 already firmly established – forget privacy, you mooncalf statistics.

Shakespeare – principles, statistics and mooncalves

He's a big topic, Shakespeare. You can't say everything about him that needs to be said in one post. But we have to start somewhere. With the foundations.

"In October 2012, I was invited by government to lead an independent review of Public Sector Information (PSI) to explore the growth opportunities of, and how to widen access to, the wealth of information held by the public sector." That's the "foundation", Mr Shakespeare says (p.3), of his latest diversion, An Independent Review of Public Sector Information.

Born in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon Mönchengladbach, Stephan Shakespeare (né Kukowski), just making sure we've got the right Shakespeare, is the founder of YouGov, one of the polling organisations which have replaced political principle in the tragedy which is national debate in the UK with market research.

What we need, says Shakespeare, now Chair of the Data Strategy Board, on the basis of his review and of a report by the respected Constitutional experts, Deloitte ("Deloitte analysis quantifies the direct value of PSI at around £1.8bn with wider social and economic benefits taking that up to around £6.8bn"), is more data and more data scientists.

Why?

midata and the South Sea Bubble

"Insolvency" has been much on our lips for the past five years and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) maintains a useful website to teach us all about it.

In 1720, with the national debt standing at £30 million, the government borrowed £7 million at 5 percent p.a. from the South Sea Company so that it could carry on a war with France and granted the company in return a monopoly over trade with South America.

The company's share price promptly went through the roof, inspiring the famous Bubble – people went mad investing in useless businesses thinking they were guaranteed to make a fortune. At the height of the mania, BIS tell us:

A company was promoted “For carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is”. After receiving £2,000 from subscribers the promoter emigrated.

No-one knew what they were going to get but they handed over £2,000 anyway. That could never happen now.

Here we are 293 years later and BIS operate 'Craig Belsham's midata blog', to which one Stephen Childerstone has contributed a post, How we are working to protect consumer’s data. (Good luck with that, Mr Childerstone.)

And what do we find?

A data-enabled online market place will create new services that will take your data and do some really interesting things with it.

What "new services" and what "really interesting things"? midata looks like nothing so much as a latter-day "undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is". None of us knows what we're going to get but we're expected to hand over our personal data anyway.

midata and the South Sea Bubble

"Insolvency" has been much on our lips for the past five years and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) maintains a useful website to teach us all about it.

In 1720, with the national debt standing at £30 million, the government borrowed £7 million at 5 percent p.a. from the South Sea Company so that it could carry on a war with France and granted the company in return a monopoly over trade with South America.

The company's share price promptly went through the roof, inspiring the famous Bubble – people went mad investing in useless businesses thinking they were guaranteed to make a fortune. At the height of the mania, BIS tell us:

A company was promoted “For carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is”. After receiving £2,000 from subscribers the promoter emigrated.

No-one knew what they were going to get but they handed over £2,000 anyway. That could never happen now.