Innovation and Empowerment in Local Government. Kent County Council Pic & Mix Pilot

1. Community, Collaboration, and Mashups
Innovation and Empowerment in Local Government
Kent County Council Pic & Mix Project
Tanya Ahmed
August 2009

2. WHAT IS A MASHUP ?
A Mashup, or ‘web application hybrid’ is a web application
that combines or aggregates data from one or more sources

3. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
Primary goal of the Pic & Mix Project from the Council’s point of view is to
evaluate what kind of data would be useful and relevant for the community.
Council is making their datasets freely available, and are designing a portal
were they can be used and aggregated with external data and applications
such as Google maps to produce something new.
The data that is being made available is business data, access to services,
economic and work deprivation, physical environment, and census area
statistics.
KCC are hopeful that community and user engagement in this digital age of
information will reveal some interesting results.

4. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
The Council is using this study to determine what information people want,
but more importantly to determine what people need in order for their lives to
feel more enriched, more meaningful, and perhaps less frustrating on a daily
basis.
The ideas and mashups generated by the pilot project will then be introduced
for all to use and will become an integral part of our web experience as a
useful and meaningful social service.

5. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
“At a very basic level, part of knowledge management is to know where knowledge, information and data are
stored. If you want to have more of a customer-focused service, then you need to know where that knowledge
and information is. If you’ve got it, you can re-engineer it in a way that customers can use via officers but also
– I suppose with the ‘Pic ‘n’ Mix’ project – by enabling people to use it themselves and create their own thing
out of it... If you enabled customers, users, communities to have that information, it would all be
part of that personalisation and empowerment agenda. But it would also hopefully create some new
information... It might be quite challenging, which is what we said when we did the competition, but that’s all
part of the democratic process.”
Carol Patrick, Kent’s Head of Innovation

6. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
Pic n Mix Project could help people search for jobs in the area, help residents
find information about local services such as school and child care facilities in
the area, report petty crime, and provide information on local community
events.
Small and medium businesses in the local community have been involved in
the first stage of the pilot project - as the ‘focus group’ for usability study
This information will be made available on a web platform provided by the
council for them to play with. The platform will support web forums and, blogs
and ‘wikis’.

7. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
As an example Google Maps could be combined with childcare facilities
and general information regarding the facilities.
This could then be combined or aggregated with information on
www.netmums.com to help parents make informed choices on childcare
facilities in their area.
This would be a powerful and useful tool or mashup for families within the
community.
Other members of the community could use the mashup as is, or they could
customise it to fit their requirements.

8. PEOPLE
COMMUNITY
INTERFACE
DATA
Interaction of People with Data through the Interface of the Web

9. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
The challenge of the project is not only to convince people outside but also within
the organisation of the potential and relevance of the project in the enrichment of
everyone’s experience of living and being part of the local community.
“Another challenge we face is managing expectations - the tools are only as good
as the information provided. What we’ll be looking at is how to make that
information easily accessible and reusable.”
Noel Hatch, Projects and Innovation Lead for Innovation at Kent

10. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
The sustainability and success of the project will depend on the usability of the
application and website, the simplicity of the user interface, and the presentation,
availability and the reliability of the data.
The activity-centred design methodology used to develop a social interface
needs to support and predict the user’s reactions at every stage of the ‘mashup
aggregation process’.

11. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
Simple to use interface - It is imperative that the task of creating mashups
be as simple as possible, otherwise the danger is that people will not try the
service at all. Ultimately the success of the pilot project has the potential to
improve the quality of life within local areas and communities by empowering
users to generate and share their own content with one another.
Collaboration and Sharing - Users also need to be able to readily look at
and comment on other people’s mashups so that the collaborative spirit of
development and exchange of ideas can be nurtured.
Training Effectiveness - The effectiveness of the training will also play a part
in the future success of the project. The use of instructional step by step
videos will enable the learning process to be quick.

12. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
Error Prevention and the potential recovery from error will also effect the
experience of the application.
Data Quality - The availability and reliability of data is paramount to the
success and usefulness of any mashup

13. THE WEB AS PLATFORM
LOOKING AT PIC & MIX WITHIN WIDER CONTEXT

14. Social Software and the Social Web

15. Three Rules from Tim Berners-Lee
“If the past was document sharing, the future is data sharing.”

16. “I want you to put your data on the Web.” But how should we go about that?
To answer that question, he provides three points of instruction.
1. URL should point to the data.
2. Anyone accessing the URL should get data back.
3. Relationships in the data should point to additional URLs with data.”

17. Mashup Platforms - Complex Adaptive Systems

18. Yahoo Pipes - Aggregating tool

19. Web 2.0 and Government

20. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
“The UK faces some big issues: climate change, an aging population, changing demographics, global
competition, etc. Increasingly, these issues are defying the conventional mechanisms we have for developing
and delivering the policy to address them.
This is where Web 2.0, or the social web, comes in. Frequently, when we think of Web 2.0, we think of blogs,
wikis, and social networks — and this is certainly the case. But Web 2.0 is more than than a collection of
internet tools. It is a philosophy. One of collaboration and user-involvement. The idea that through the efforts
and knowledge of many, we can tackle issues which far exceed the capacity of one.”
OpenGov

21. Making Government Data available for all

22. DESIGNING SOCIAL
INTERFACE
PIC & MIX PROJECT

23. DESIGNING SOCIAL INTERFACE
Support Social Interaction Social design as the “conception, planning, and
production of websites and applications that support social interaction.
Understanding Behavior - Behavior is a function of both personality and
their environment. The environment encompasses everything around us,
whether it is the physical environment or the software or web interfaces we
use.
Understanding Usage Cycle of an Application The relationship a user will
have with a particular social website, application or software - dividing their
usage pattern into 5 stages. Their psychology and behaviour patterns playa
part in the cycle

24. Usage Cycle - Joshua Porter

25. FRAMEWORK FOR SOCIAL DESIGN
Focus on Primary Activity - Answer the question: What is your Audience
doing?
Identify Social Objects - Identify the objects that people interact with while
doing the activity
Choose your Core Feature Set - From the activity and objects derive a core
feature set answering the question: What are the actions people perform on the
objects, and which are important enough to support in the web application?
Understand importance of Pesonal Value of social software

26. THE NEXT (BIG) STEP
PIC & MIX PROJECT

27. FRAMEWORK FOR SOCIAL DESIGN
Detailed design document based on an activity centred design methodology.
Task Flow Diagrams and detailed descriptions of all the tasks necessary for a
user to complete an activity will laid out.
These Tasks will be based on research of using Yahoo Pipes and possibly
other mashup creation tools to see what issues arise. Observing others using a
tool like this will help inform the design of the mashup tool, with regards to the
features and considerations that need to be taken into account when working
on the design documentation.

28. FRAMEWORK FOR SOCIAL DESIGN
Wireframes will then be created and will help with the visualisation of the
activity-based design document.
These deliverables will be handed over to Kent County Council at this stage for
discussion with the application development team. User testing will also be
conducted at a later date once the Mashup Tool (Beta Tool) has been launched
and the pilot stage is underway.
The results of user testing can then be combined to provide a holistic view of
the Pic & Mix pilot at the end of the study when a review will be done.

29. PIC & MIX PILOT PROJECT
The Pic & Mix Pilot can be seen as the prototype phase within the larger context of local councils engaging
with members of the community to deliver services and information that they need, rather than delivering
services that the council wants to deliver. It is all about empowering people to challenge and change local
councils and government’s policies and methods of dealing with the ‘general public.
A user-centric approach where the individual is at the center of the public policy is the new model which
mirrors how the world wide web and web 2.0 technologies have turned passive individuals into active
information and knowledge sharing participants - or ‘information aggregators’.
The liberating of data, whether it is enterprise data or government data, in the spirit of democracy and
transparency is a powerful idea. In a similar way the user is at the center of any social networking website on
the world wide web. This is the “design pattern” for a digital society.