The DOBlog

The Irish Times today carries a story on page five which details a number of proposed changes to the management of the Electoral Register arising from the kerfuffle of the past two years about how totally buggered it is. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve written a little bit about this in the past (earning an Obsessive Blogger badge in the process donchaknow). It was just under two years ago that I opened this blog with a post on this very topic…

A number of points raised in the article interest me, if for no other reason than they sound very familiar - more on that anon. Other interest me because they still run somewhat counter to the approach that is needed to finally resolve the issue.

I’ll start with the bits that run counter to the approach required. The Oireachtas Committee has been pretty much consistent in its application of the boot to Local Authorities as regards the priority they give to the management of the Electoral Register. According to the Irish Times article, the TDs and Senators found that:

“Running elections is not a core function of local authorities. Indeed, it is not a function that appears to demand attention every year. It can, therefore, be questioned if it gets the priority it warrants under the array of authorities”

I must humbly agree and disagree with this statement. By appearing to blame Local Authorities for the problem and for failing to prioritise the management of the Electoral Register, the Committee effectively absolves successive Ministers for the Environment and other elected officials from failing to ensure that this ‘information asset’ was properly maintained. Ultimately, all Local Authorities fall under the remit of the Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government. As the ’supreme being’ in that particular food chain, the Minister (and their department) is in a position to set policy, establish priorities and mandate adequate resourcing of any Local Authority function, from Water Services to Electoral Franchise.

The key issue is that Franchise section was not seen as important by anyone. A key information asset was not managed, no continual plans were put in place for the acquisition of information or the maintenance of information. Only when there were problems applying the information did anyone give a darn. This, unfortunately, is a problem that is not confined to Local Government and Electoral data however - a large number of companies world wide have felt the pain of failing to manage the quality of their information assets in recent times.

Failing to acknowledge that the lack of management priority was systemic and endemic within the entire hierarchy of Central and Local Government means that a group of people who probably tried to do their best with the resources assigned to them are probably going to feel very aggrieved. “The Register is buggered. It’s your fault. We’re taking it away from you” is the current message. Rather it should be “The system we were operating is broken. Collectively there was a failure to prioritise the management of this resource. The people tried to make it work, but best efforts were never enough. It needs to be replaced.”

W. Edward’s Deming advised people seeking to improve quality to ‘drive out fear’. A corollary of that is that one should not engage in blame when a system is broken unless you are willing to blame all actors in the system equally.

However, I’m equally guilty as I raised this issue (albeit not in as ‘blaming’ a tone) back in… oh 2006.:

“Does the current structure of Local Authorities managing Electoral Register data without a clear central authority with control/co-ordination functions (such as to build the national ‘master’ file) have any contribution to the overstatement of the Register?“

Moving on to other points that sound very familiar…

1. Errors are due to a “wide variety of practices” within Local Authorities. Yup, I recall writing about that as a possible root cause back in 2006. Here and here and here and here and here in fact.
2. The use of other data sources to supplement the information available to maintain the Register is one suggestion. Hmmm… does this sound like it covers the issue?

Could the Electoral Register process make use of a data source of people who are moving house (such as An Posts’s mail redirection service or newaddress.ie)? How can that be utilised in an enhanced process to manage & maintain the electoral register? These are technically surrogate sources of reality rather than being ‘reality’ itself, but they might be useful.

That’s from a post I wrote here on the 24th April 2006.

And then there’s this report, which was sent to Eamon Gilmore on my behalf and which ultimately found its way to Dick Roche’s desk while he was still the Minister in the DOELG. Pages 3 to 5 make interesting reading in light of the current proposals. Please note the negatives that I identified with the use of data from 3rd party organisations that would need to be overcome for the solution to be entirely practicable. These can be worked around with sound governance and planning, but bumbling into a solution without understanding the potential problems that would need to be addressed will lead to a less than successful implementation.

3. The big proposal is the creation of a ‘central authority’ to manage the Electoral Register. This is not new. It is simply a variation on a theme put forward by Eamon Gilmore in a Private Member’s Bill which was debated back in 2006 and defeated at the Second Stage(The Electoral Registration Commissioner Bill, 2005). This is a proposal that I also critiqued in the report that wound its way to Dick Roche… see pages 3 to 5 again. I also raise issues of management and management culture at page 11.
4. The use of PPS numbers is being considered but there are implications around Data Protection . Hmm… let’s see… I mentioned those issues in this post and in this post.

And it further assumes that the PPS Identity is always accurate (it may not be, particularly if someone is moving house or has moved house. I know of one case where someone was receiving their Tax Certs at the address they lived in in Dublin but when they went to claim something, all the paperwork was sent to their family’s home address down the country where they hadn’t lived for nearly 15 years.)

In my report in 2006 (and on this blog) I also discussed the PPS Number and the potential for fraud if not linked to some form of photographic ID given the nature of documents that a PPS number can be printed on in the report linked to above. This exact point was referenced by Senator Camillus Glynn at a meeting of the Committee last week


“I would not have a difficulty with using the PPS card. It is logical, makes sense and is consistent with what obtains in the North. The PPS card should also include photographic evidence. I could get hold of Deputy Scanlon’s card. Who is to say that I am not the Deputy if his photograph is not on the card? Whatever we do must be as foolproof as possible.”

This comment was supported by a number of other committee members.

So, where does that leave us? Just under two years since I started obsessively blogging about this issue, we’ve moved not much further than when I started. There is a lot of familiarity about the sound-bites coming out at present - to put it another way, there is little on the table at the moment (it seems) that was not contained in the report I prepared or on this blog back in 2006.

What is new? Well, for a start they aren’t going to make Voter Registration compulsory. Back in 2006 I debated this briefly with Damien Blake… as I recall Damien had proposed automatic registration based on PPS number and date of birth. I questioned whether that would be possible without legislative changes or if it was even desirable. However, the clarification that mandatory registration is now off the table is new.

The proposal for a centralised governance agency and the removal of responsibility for Franchise /Electoral Register information from the Local Authorities sounds new. But it’s not. It’s a variation on a theme that simply addresses the criticism I had of the original Labour Party proposal. By creating a single agency the issues of Accountability/Responsibility and Governance are greatly simplified, as are issues of standardisation of forms and processes and information systems.

One new thing is the notion that people should be able to update their details year round, not just in a narrow window in November. This is a small but significant change in process and protocol that addresses a likely root cause.

What is also new - to an extent - is the clear proposal that this National Electoral Office should be managed by a single head (one leader), answerable to the Dail and outside the normal Civil Service structures (enabling them to hire their own staff to meet their needs). This is important as it sets out a clear governance and accountability structure (which I’d emphasised was needed - Labour’s initial proposal was for a Quango to work in tandem with Local Authorities… a recipe for ‘too many cooks’ if ever I’d heard one). That this head should have the same tenure as a judge to “promote independence from government” is also important, not just because of the independence and allegiance issues it gets around, but also because it sends a very clear message.

The Electoral Register is an important Information Asset and needs to be managed as such. It is not a ‘clerical’ function that can be left to the side when other tasks need to be performed. It is serious work for serious people with serious consequences when it goes wrong.

Putting its management on a totally independent footing with clear accountability to the Oireachtas and the Electorate rather than in an under-resourced and undervalued section within one of 34 Local Authorities assures an adequate consistency of Governance and a Constancy of Purpose. The risk is that unless this agency is properly funded and resourced it will become a ‘quality department’ function that is all talk and no trousers and will fail to achieve its objectives.

As much of the proposals seem to be based on (or eerily parallel) analysis and recommendations I was formulating back in 2006, I humbly put myself forward for the position of Head of the National Elections Office

Darren over at the Crabbling Otter has laid down a challenge to me, which was in turn given to him by GrannyMar. The challenge is to write my memoir in six words. It is harder then you think. I normally take 20 words to say hello and forty eight to say goodbye.

Worked diligently, invested time, achieved joy.

That’s my starter for 10. But if I was allowed 10 there’d be four more words to play with… bugger.

Simon over at Tuppenceworth shared his thoughts yesterday on comments by our Minister for the Information Society and another Public Servant on bloggers at a conference that had nothing to do with blogging (’twas about Software Quality and testing).

[Update - Imagine my shock when I found the speech on the Dept of the Taoiseach website...scroll down to the section on Innovation and see the exact terms used by the Minister responsible for the Information Society. On one hand he has a point, but it could have been phrased a lot more... politically]

As usual, bloggers have shaken their fists or slapped their foreheads in disbelief at what it seems was said.

Now now children. Comparing a Junior Minister to a scooby doo villain is impolite if chucklesomely accurate. Also, it is just possible that they may having been having a go at BOGGERS - an equally maligned group that is misunderstood and misrepresented by ‘traditional’ media. (Just watch Killnascully for the evidence). [Sadly that was not the case, as evidenced by the text of the speech]

I was at the conference in question and having thought about it overnight I think the Local Government Computing Services person’s comments should probably be taken in the context of decisions to adopt open standards or not… bloggers are all for mashups and open standards based solutions as it is the “Web2.0 thing”. However if it all falls apart because the person making the widget that holds it together stops maintaining their stuff then you get kicked. If you are a blogger your site goes down or comments don’t work or your google maps mashup goes on its arse.

If you’re a government organisation you end up on the front page of the Irish Times… “Government IT investment fiasco”. The we bloggers chip in and the spin and bluster gets questioned and then your day goes from ‘challenging’ to ‘fricking nightmare’ in a matter of hours. But guess what… project managers in the private sector have to put up with that stuff too. I have no sympathy. Lots of empathy though.

Looking back at notes from that presentation, at the time he made the comments about bloggers he was discussing Open Source solutions. His point was simply that Open Source solutions bring a degree of risk with them, particularly if they are being adapted for use in a given context - if an Open Source solution falls in the forest and there is no developer community to hear it, is your solution f*cked?

That is a risk that all companies have to balance between Open Source and Proprietary solutions. His mistake, as I would see it, has been to take criticism from bloggers about decisions a little bit too personally. Of course, if the bloggers turned out to be right in their criticisms then that might make things sting even more.

Another presenter on the day gave a good insight into how to pick Open Source tools though.. he recommended only picking stuff from SourceForge with 90% or higher activity showing a maintained and managed piece of software, not a hobby project.

Also bloggers are not synonymous with Open Standards/Open Source developers. We’re just as screwed if someone moves the cheese and useful piece of software or useful standard stops being supported (PHP4 vs PHP5 for example… too many webhosts are still running PHP4 while Open Source developers are moving to PHP5 based apps - I think of Drupal and CiviCRM as examples. Hosting providers who can’t support PHP5 leave organisations using Open Source tools like civicrm stuck on less effective or efficient and unsupported versions of the applications. A bit like a proprietary vendor end-of-lifing an application).

I’ve written extensively on this blog over the past two years about information management/information quality issues in government processes (PPARS, Electoral Register, IBTS etc) so I think I might fall in to the category of annoying and obsessive bloggers. However, and I’m open to correction, I do believe that I’ve ‘played the ball and not the man’ at each turn, with my focus being on leadership (ie Ministers) and on sound practices (many people I spoke to yesterday who had happened on my blog said nice things about my IBTS posts). And I’ve never shied away from debating the point to build a better understanding of issues.

Importantly, I believe that my posts and comments have been fairly balanced. I did my best to argue that the problem in PPARs wasn’t the software or the project team but the sheer mind numbing complexity of consoldiating non-standard data and divergent processes into a system that requires standards and standardisation. Each ‘custom’ work calendar represented a ‘customisation’ in the application - ergo the cost. The project team did a great job to achieve anything with the mess they were given to start with. The electoral register… I put the blame were it needed to be - on the Minister who is responsibile for defining strategy and allocating resources. I analysed the root causes and issues and criticsed the door to door clean up because it wasn’t a solution and it wasn’t operated consistently. I won’t mention the IBTS in detail but to say… harrumph - and watch this space (I’m not finished there).

Tom Kitt’s comments, however, baffle me as it did seem to be a throw away remark triggered by some deep seated frustration. Perhaps my focus on Dick Roche’s bumbling mis-management of the Electoral Register issue and John Gormely’s apparent lack of a sense of urgency to implement the legislative changes required to correct the processes (rather than pissing around on the edges doing scrap and rework and working with a marketing company to design a new logo for the department that looks like three snails in an orgy) have irked the political classes? Perhaps the blogger commentary on the Mahon Tribunal have peeved the Fianna Fail leadership?

Perhaps some blogger has written something nasty about Minister Kitt’s offsprung, the folksy crooner David Kitt? (Twenty - if you did … tut tut). Maybe he read some comments about the car in the re-invented Knightrider TV show and took them out of context?

Who knows.

What I do know is that an Information Society starts with an informed community that shares information. Blogs and blogging provides an opportunity for informed people with experience and insights into niche areas and obscure disciplines to share their thoughts and views on things.

Occassionally that means that the type of person who, in the Service would never be left alone in the same timezone as a Minister because they are hard-core techie (beard, jumper and sandals with socks - and that’s just the wimmin) and are passionate about a solution or approach that is not ’status quo’, can find a platform to make their opinion known. An occasionally a newspaper picks up on that (not, sadly, in the case of the Electoral Register) and it gets a broader airing.

More often, it means that people who have experience in a particular industry, process or discipline but might otherwise have no access to media can peer behind the spin and bluster put out by the political classes and their handlers and by public sector organisations to raise questions about what might have happened really or suggest alternative approaches for consideration. If that makes people uncomfortable then tough. An informed society requires higher standards.

However, Marshall McLuhan’s view that ‘the medium is the message’ has gone the way of the dodo. The medium is not the message. Not all bloggers are good. Not all bloggers are informed. Not all bloggers want to criticise constructively. But to dismiss all bloggers and their opinions with a frustrated sigh is to miss the point completely (a bit like Mr Waters did).

The blog is the medium. The message comes from each blogger as an individual member of society.

An Information Society. (tada!)

Of course, to counter the criticism bloggers need to up their game and take a moment’s pause to engage their brains a bit before letting their fingers to the talking. The right speak does not guarantee you the right to be heard. But speaking well, clearly and appropriately, with sound ideas that you are willing to accept critique on (as long as that critique likewise plays the ball and not the man) increases the chance that people will want to listen to you.

By improving the quality of your personal blogging you improve the quality of the Information Society. By ensuring that you have checked your facts (or are willing to correct errors quickly) you improve the Information Quality in this Information Society. Then we will find ourselves in a functioning, citizen supported, Information Society.

Another aspect of Tom Kitt’s alleged comments might also relate to the fact that there are a sizeable proportion of the population who aren’t bloggers (yet). Government needs to manage for the needs of the State as a whole, not just the needs of lobby groups or hobby groups or bloggers. (I’m shitting myself laughing as I write this)

Informed lobby groups (trade unions, IBEC, the SFA, even the late lamented IrelandOffline) influence Government policy to various extents. The media affects government policy (if it gets criticised in the media the Minister may hold off pushing the policy, particularly around election time). Grumpy old men walking around outside Leinster House with placards on their backs… well they don’t really achieve anything on their own (perhaps they should blog).

Whether you blog or not does not deprive you of your right as a citizen to seek to affect and effect change in government. So, you can seek to influence through an established media fair play.. get your op ed piece in The Irish Times, go on Questions and Answers and rip the token politician a new one (or punch right wing columnists who haven’t got a clue about the real world), write your letters to the editor, or start a pressure group and doorstep your elected representatives. Fair play to you.

Or you can start a blog to raise awareness of the issue (perhaps combined with the other approaches). If the handful of bloggers who have written specifically about Information Society issues or the challenges of may government/quasi-government IT projects and performed a critique of the strategy (or lack of), best practices (or lack of) or solutions (or lack of) that were delivered can raise the frustrated ire of the Minister responsible for the Information Society then we’re a pretty darned effective group.

If the government chooses to dismiss your opinions because you are not an established lobby group or because you are just ‘citizens’ then there is something rotten in the pre-Information Society society.

Minister for the Information Society… we’re bloggers. We’re here. We’re informed and we want to be social, socially active, active on social issues, and to build a strong foundation for a ‘realised information society’. Some of us are already elected officials, some of us might consider running for office. Some of us might be advisors to your opposition. It’s not because we’re bloggers. It’s because we’re citizens.

Dismiss us if you want, but like the smell of boiling cabbage on a hot summer’s day we’re not going away in a hurry. To paraphrase Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman:

“Makers of an Information Society. Creators of an Information Society.Be careful what kind of Information Society you’re producin’ here.

hoo hah.

(of course, that cuts both ways - bloggers need to seek to seperate the ’signal’ from the ‘noise’ so that good blogs and bloggers can be distinguished from waffle and bile).

But I still can’t f**king stand David Kitt’s music and the Knightrider car is just dire (sorry).