Posts by B Jones
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Amongst my friends and acquaintances with children, there's every possible formal expression of relationship, from civil union to cohabiting but unmarried, to married young, to married after the kids were born, to divorced and remarried. Many of their kids would be captured within the "unmarried" group, but only a tiny fraction of these would be in the sort of unstable situations that might warrant some "won't somebody think of the children" handwringing. The metric is no longer a good indicator of family instability, and arguably it hasn't been in years.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Emma Hart,
At least now it must be a conscious decision, and not something that’s just “what you do”.
I don't know about that. There's been a sudden outbreak of women who "just don't like their surname", totally independently of any wider societal factors, they swear.
From Richard:
Of course, it’s merely trading one man’s last name (their father’s) for another.
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that the name people called me my whole life was my name, not somebody else's, regardless of who I inherited it from. By that logic nobody's name is anybody's.
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Can't speak for the public service in general but my old dept was heavily weighted towards law, public policy, politics, philosophy, history etc among policy advisers - backgrounds that ensure you can write or think well, but don't require you to be able to work with statistics or Excel. A few exceptions had maths or economics. I expect this varies depending on the subject matter, and research units would have more empirical-minded staff. But it's not senior advisers dictating IT or public records policy within a department, it's information services. The further up the policy food chain you are, the more insulated you are from having to deal with IT issues because you have more access to admin support. The twink example I mentioned above was someone fairly senior, who I suspect had a miscommunication with someone he thought would do his photocopying for him.
Anyway, the whole business illustrates to me the importance of a back-office function within departments that is senior enough to drive high-level departmental practices and resourced well enough to help advisers on the ground comply with those practices. You could say a good road code, plus traffic cops, plus driving instructors.
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To be fair, Ministers don't have buckets of time, and finding ways to get their attention and have an impact is always going to be a challenge. Think of the impact infographics have on public debate, vs wordy journal articles.
But there are a number of potential roadblocks to sharing information between IT professionals and Ministers - one is that a lot of technical people have trouble communicating with a general audience, using minimal jargon. I used to get these awful emails from IT allegedly explaining a technical problem facing the network - burps of jargon so dense they'd create more anger and mockery than the problem itself. It takes work to get around those issues.
Another roadblock is whether the IT/knowledge management people are plugged in, in the right way, to the way the state sector decides how it does things. I think this is probably closer to the heart of things. But it takes leadership to see how to do this and make changes accordingly.
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Government departments, or at least the parts of them whose business it is to know, generally do; it's just that they're made up of lots and lots of people who don't all share a skill set and don't always talk to each other, and the people who don't know are occasionally let loose on the public stage without appropriate checks and balances. And what government departments know is very different to what they can convey to government Ministers, and non-Minister MPs have even less access to expert information.
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It's a Two Cultures problem to some extent, and a generational problem as well. People making the important decisions in policy ministries don't realise its importance because they're steeped in humanities rather than information science culture, and are mostly older and less likely to have picked up information science through having fun with computers. Whereas the IT and information management parts of the ministry might be full of competent people of all ages, they're not structurally integrated in the agency's business sufficiently to transmit their values into the rest of the agency. I haven't seen it myself, but I can imagine declaring those functions to be part of a downsizable "back office" can't have helped.
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OnPoint: Government Portfolios for Dummies, in reply to Stephen R,
I’m lead to believe that there aren’t any standard procedures for redacting those documents
I've seen everything from photocopying documents festooned with "OIA tape" to blank out sensitive bits, to changing the font to white while printing, to actually sending out a document with twink over the redacted bits, which the recipient could read by scratching it off. None of these work with electronic release, of course, which is newfangled in the eyes of anyone who had to apply for their job by posting a hard copy of their CV in.
Version control is another issue that militates against accessible documents - there's fifteen versions of a paper that's gone out for consultation, entitled everything from "xx agency final comments", "final to Min", "final to Cab", "really final", and "doc1.doc", and the best way to be sure it's the really final one is to find the one with signatures on it and head off to the scanner.
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For reasons I have yet to work out, the people responsible for creating documents aren't the people who understand why there's a difference between scanning and converting electronically to pdf. In my experience if you asked a policy analyst to prepare a document for publication on the web, the first thing they'd do (after freaking out about whether it's sensitive) is head for the scanner. One of my biggest frustrations in my previous working life is failing to break that assumption, despite working closely with policy analysts. The rest of the IT and Information Management infrastructure, who should have been all over it, worked in different parts of the building and only got talked to when something went wrong.
I think that this is at the structural heart of this and other government information problems - yay, it's great that information tools have simplified to the point where policy analysts with minimal training can use them to put out important public information, because having to get specialist staff to do it took ages, but, boo, putting those tools in the hands of people who don't really understand how they should be used can generate chaos.
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Excuse my ignorance, but I'm not sure what NEET figures add here. As far as I can tell (and the very different rates for males and females Matthew cites gives a hint of it), it includes young full-time parents as well as those out of paid work or training for other reasons. There are different economics at play for starting young families.
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in pursuit of what DARPA called Total Information Awareness.
I read something about this recently, but unfortunately my retention of ideas is better than my ability to dig up a proper citation - maybe it was Gladwell's thing about thin-slicing. It was a story about some US army war games, in which they were running some Total Information Awareness system through its paces, against one of their more experienced generals. The general came up with a bunch of simple low-tech workarounds so that his side weren't reliant on the technology the Total Information Awareness was all over, and ran circles around it. One of the problems was the huge buckets of data needed so much processing. What you can do with the data is more important than how much of it you can catch.