John Hudson

The UK’s Social Security system is no stranger to IT disasters. Recent ‘highlights’ include: the long term closure (almost two years to date!) of the online tax credits payment system after widespread fraudulent claims were detected; the scrapping of the Benefits Processing Repayment Programme before launch but after £141 million of expenditure; the admission that the Child Support Agency could not function properly because of inadequate IT systems; which itself… followed earlier admissions that many Child Support applications were simply not being processed because of inadequacies in new systems. We should not forget earlier legendary disasters including the Operational Strategy of the 1980s/early 1990s that was billed as the biggest IT project in the whole of Europe but failed to meet the majority of its objectives despite coming in around three times over budget.

But, today’s news that the personal details of all families in the UK claiming Child Benefit (theoretically all with a child under 16) have gone missing after being placed on two CDs and then biked by a courier, in an unregistered delivery, has to be up there with the best of them. The discs, destined for the National Audit Office, apparently carried the full records of all claimants, meaning whoever finds these discs potentially has access to the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and bank details of up to 25 million people. The data is, we are told, password protected, but astonishingly is not encrypted so getting into the records shouldn’t be too difficult. Such basic inadequacies in protecting data really do beggar belief and, while the Chair of HM Revenues & Custom has resigned over the matter, deeper questions surely need to be asked here.

I watched some of the debate that took place in the House of Commons after the Chancellor announced the full details of the incident. The Lib Dem’s Vince Cable rightly asked why on earth data was being transported in this manner and pointed the finger at the prehistoric computer systems that underpin the whole social security sector. The Conservatives are using the event to attack the ID card proposals and they may well be right in suggesting this will shatter public confidence in the government’s ability to run such a national ID system in a way that does not threaten privacy, especially if the HMRC data does fall into criminal hands and this breaks into the media. But, what I found most amazing of all was the intervention of Edward Leigh, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, who said he had spoken to the Comptroller General and been told that the NAO had specifically requested that they only be sent the National Insurance numbers of Child Benefit recipients; all other personal details should have been stripped out of the data they were sent. Leigh had also established that after the NAO had informed HRMC that the data had not arrived they sent two more copies of the discs (presumably by the same method!?!?).

In other words, it seems HMRC have been biking insecurely protected personal data of millions of people around the country for no good reason other than they could not be arsed to reformat it, delete the unneeded items or to fill in the extra paper work needed for a registered delivery. As Leigh says, the HMRC appear to have been ‘criminally irresponsible’ here.

There is some good news though. Given the track record of computing projects in the sector, chances are the discs weren’t burned properly and when they are found they will probably have no data on them at all.

It takes a real geek to stumble across social policy issues during their first few hours in Second Life (see previous post!), but my geekiness knows no bounds! (Or, from the policy end, should that by wonk/wonkiness?) It turns out that the NHS will be using the Second Life platform during consultations on the future of the health service with a virtual conference planned for Wednesday! Naturally, I had to check out the NHS zone on Second Life and it was interesting - a mock up of a future care facility and a few videos outlining options for the future - but, as with so much on Second Life, is mainly a loosely veiled marketing effort.

The same is true of yet another social policy area I came across: a Diplomacy Island where David Miliband delivered a speech last week (archived on YouTube). This area seems to have real potential (a library of UN publications looked very interesting for instance), but the only virtual embassy open to date belongs to the Maldives and, well, it is a nice PR piece that highlights recent public policy gains while skipping over some of the major issues about democracy in the Maldives.

How far REAL debate is taking place on Second Life is a question I want to explore a little more as I get further into it, but so far debate has been hard to find…

Oh, and here’s a picture of people dancing for their welfare money on Second Life’s Welfare Island..

Second Life: Welfare Island

After some live demos of interesting Second Life apps at BarCampLeeds and a few interesting questions from fellow Yorkie John Holmes about whether there was anything more than hyperbole in the Guardian’s two page spread on virtual worlds this weekend, I thought I’d better finally get round to properly checking out Second Life to see what the fuss is about.

My view has long been that I am sure that virtual worlds hold great potential, but at the moment the investment of time needed to get up running on a platform like Second Life is still too high for truly mass usage to be a possibility. After setting myself up Second Life, I can see that the investment of money needed should not be underestimated too: my nearly new MacBook Pro struggles a little at times to keep pace and no other application I use sends the cooling fans whirring so regularly! Moreover, after a few hours wandering around I can’t say I was anything other than moderately entertained by the whole thing, not least because linden dollars - the Second Life currency which can be bought using real world dollars or earned by selling goods to other Second Life citizens - are needed for just about anything of real interest. (Indeed, it seems that in the Second Life, income poverty is as exclusionary as in the first life.)

All this, I guess, is what I expected. What came as a real surprise though was the representation of the welfare state in Second Life. After mastering the basics of Second Life (choosing hair style, deciding whether to have baggy or tight fit jeans, making my avatar taller and thiner than the real me etc…) I searched for some popular places to hang out and right there in the top five most popular destinations was ‘Welfare Island’. The promise of some modest assistance appealed, not least because as a new character with no linden dollars I couldn’t actually get up to much fun.

Now, having long ago dipped into Howard Rheingold’s work on virtual communities, I thought that some of that old hippy counter culture spirit might still be alive and well in Welfare Island: some support for new comers perhaps or friendly support at least. I couldn’t have been more wrong. If Welfare Island is indicative of Second Life’s culture then it is way off the scale on the right hand side of the social policy spectrum.

First off, the ‘Welfare Office’ on Welfare Island pays out money not on the basis of entitlements or need but through ‘Welfare ATMs’. No social contract here, but a cash machine that dishes out dollars in an indiscriminate manner to anyone who turns up looking for them. This is pretty bold anti-welfare imagery, but is only the start, with visitors told they can ‘make more money on Welfare Island than anywhere else on Second Life’. Welfare is described in terms of ‘free money’, the ‘easy way to earn linden’ or ‘handouts’. An Uncle Sam like figure (Uncle Sands) appears regularly (a figure of the state’s beneficence?) and exhorative proclamations to ‘get off those camping chairs stupid’ and learn how to ‘make it out of the ghetto’ by actively seeking more welfare payments rather than ’standing in line’ fly at your character from all directions.

Added to this, welfare has no dignity in Second Life. Welfare payments are never a right, but are offered in exchange for some activity. For the most part this is filling in marketing surveys. I guess this could be seen as some sort of work-for-the-dole style system, but the labeling of recipients with the phrase ‘I’m on Welfare’ above their head doesn’t do much to alter the view that it’s some kind of punishment. Worse still, the main alternatives on offer revolve even stricter control and degradation of the recipient of welfare: dancing for cash with ‘I’m on welfare’ above your head for instance or, staggeringly, the offer of $75L for users taking a picture of themselves holding a piece of paper with one of these phrases written on it:

• I’m On Welfare !!
• I’m a Welfare Millionaire !!!
• Welfare Island Rocks !!!
• Welfare Pays !
• Welfare Island Supports Me!!
• Uncle Sands Rocks !!!
• Uncle Sands Paid Me !!!

Note: these are pictures of actual users and NOT their avatars. These pictures are to be used, at some stage, on the island’s own web site at www.WelfareIsland.com, presumably as a marketing campaign, though no sign of them at the time of writing. Amazingly, users are told ‘You will get paid *BONUS* Linden for creativity. Examples: Dressing as a Hobbo’. Fucking hell - did the love-child of Charles Murray and Margaret Thatcher design this island?!?! I won’t even hazard a guess as to why the main social area of the island is a bar called the ‘Stoned Crow’…

Now, if it’s only a game, perhaps none of this matters and I am not one for making simple virtual world gaming equals real world problems links. (After all, I love stealing cars, shooting people and causing mayhem in Grand Theft Auto, but wouldn’t say boo to a goose in the real world.) But if Second Life has aspirations to be a genuine (virtual) community, what does it say that so many Second Life users draw linden dollars from an island that completely trashes the welfare state and takes cheap shots at the poor? There are rules in place in Second Life to protect the social fabric of the virtual world: the first thing I tried to do on being landed into Second Life was fly someone’s helicopter - a natural action in GTA! - only to be prevented from so doing because I didn’t own it, so it’s not like anything goes there. In other words, a virtual ’state’ of sorts exists, but it is a minimal state and the idea of welfare is only there to be scoffed at.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of scoffing of course, but welfare island isn’t sophisticated political satire, it’s just weak cover for a marketing operation. Indeed, there is a good reason for the minimal state in Second Life: it is so much more than a game for the owners of Second Life and the real world companies - such as Welfare Island - who have ambitions to develop profitable real world companies within the Second Life platform. Second Life citizens need linden dollars to do pretty much anything in Second Life (including developing their own personality by buying new outfits etc and buying land and property in order to properly join a community). If they have real world dollars they can exchange them for linden dollars. If they don’t, then tough: you start with $0L and will have to get yourself off to Welfare Island to get yourself up and running. Desperate citizens will stoop low: they will fill in marketing surveys that they wouldn’t otherwise fill in that will lead to real world profiling and mail shots; they will offer their own real world image up to the Welfare Island company for future real world marketing campaigns; and, they will generally waste their time in a hived off portion of the Second Life game performing stunts for linden dollars so they can access the regular parts of Second Life they really want to be in. I guess that if all citizens started off with $1,000L then very few would need to buy more linden dollars from Second Life’s founders and companies like Welfare Island wouldn’t exist at all.

In short, at first glance Second Life looks a pretty mean spirited place and its institutions (i.e. rules) foster this spirit in order to drive profit. A far cry from the virtual utopia that some present or the value laden community celebrated in earlier literature on virtual communities.

I am at BarCampLeeds today and, if the battery holds out, will be liveblogging the event!

11.00: TV 3.0 by Mark Sailes. Interesting idea: tagging TV and film with meta-data and time stamps to allow, for example, Star Wars geeks to find and watch all the light sabre fights without the excuse for dialogue that pads that bits that people really want to see. But a big debate about how to get the meta-data up there: IM chats, voice recognition of fans chatting on the phone? Many seemed to favour logging phone chats, but I am not sure this will work as people will need to stay on topic the whole time. A big stumbling block could be legal issues: what if each time a particular actor appears they are tagged as a child abuser following, say, a contested tabloid story? Or, if people watching news or documentaries repeatedly label a government minister as a liar? Without heavy moderation it could be a money spinner for the libel lawyers I guess!

11.50: Giving Web a Voice by Georgia Brown. An interesting demo of a tool that can be embedded into social networking sites (demos of linkedin, myspace and second life) to allow people to chat to their friends using their existing VOIP accounts. The Second Life demo was particularly cool: they plan to link up with some bars in Second Life and allow people to start chats in special area of the bars themselves. (More at: www.phonefromhere.com) One potential issue is the question of how far their target demographic (younger people) is interested in voice chat rather than text chat; the explosion in text message volumes seems to have been in part driven by a preference for texting over calling.

Another issue raised by Georgia’s talk for me is that of the BarCamp format. At 10.00am the agenda for the unconference was drawn up with people using post-it notes to place short titles of their talks on a white board, but there is no additional context for each talk (usually not even a name for the presenter). As a social scientist, the title of this talk - ‘Giving Web A Voice’ - conjured up all sorts of images about the democratic governance of the web, but for the techies it was obvious it was about VOIP! On the way out of the session another problem with scheduling emerged: people are moving the post-it notes and some (good natured) arguments are breaking out about scheduling!

After lunch: Paul Robinson on why futurology is rubbish. No confusion with this title! A provocative talk that suggested a lot of social science that looks towards the future is a waste of time - ouch! I agreed with much of what he said about the impact of unpredictable factors on the future (with a nod to chaos theory and complexity theory), but his overall conclusion that there is no point looking to the future I couldn’t agree with… I asked him if past action was no guide to the future how he could know whether to put trousers on before leaving the house… He also raised the old chestnut about Thomas Watson, the head of IBM in its early days, predicting a world market of only five computers as a classic example of a failed prediction. However, it seems more likely that this was a case of failed historical research: there is no convincing evidence Watson ever said this and, having read Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust I can’t imagine an operator as cold and ruthless as Watson dismissing ANY opportunity for IBM to sell a new product.

A live link up with BarCampOttowa followed, but technical hitches took hold and a voice only Skype chat was all that could be achieved in the end. A nice idea, but…

15.10 Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities by Reinhold Behringer. A lot crammed into this talk (too much really), but some really interesting stuff including computer driven cars and computers playing music with (and, crucially, being able to keep up with) a human orchestra.

16.30 - Valerie De Leonibus, Regeneration, Tech and the North. A very interesting session that covered a wide range of topics, not least during a lively discussion that went way over the alloted time such was the interest! Issues covered include how to get IP from universities exploited more effectively, how funding for tech industries focuses too much on infrastructure rather than human capital (especially how much harder it is to get some support for investing in labour compared to investing in bricks and mortar), how to make sure the benefits for the wider community can be ensured and what the north might do differently. The movement of high tech talent from Milan to Turin (and the switch of investment from motoring to new ventures there) was one particularly interesting example I hadn’t come across before. Lots of talk about Richard Florida’s work on tech, talent, toleration and place. Also a fair bit of discussion about the importance of events such as BarCamp in aiding the north’s creative economy.

6.20 - Gung Ho Start Up by Guy Fraser of Adaptavist. This was a great talk! He took us through the story of how he and Dan Hardiker (job title: ‘Miracle Worker’) accidentally established a hugely successful start up (Adaptavist) by not planning for the future, not writing business plans and not following the normal rules of the game. They are evidently hugely talented guys and this is clearly a large part of the explanation for their success, but by only planning at most six months into the future and listening closely to their clients about their needs they are able to roll with the latest developments at adapt quickly to change.

7.00 Wrap-Up and After Party. i-Phones and i-Pods were up for grabs in the wrap up prize draw and, amazingly, my name came out of the hat… but for a copy of Photoshop rather than one of the coveted i-Phones… at the risk of sounding a total brat, cool as Photoshop is I am tempted to see if I can swap this for an i-Phone somewhere! A couple of people BarCamp had i-Phones and they look as good as the hype suggests… Following the wrap-up, the after party got off to a shaky start, with Asda failing to deliver the beer on time. However, Rockstar Games put a generous tab behind the bar of a local pub and it is safe to say this did the trick.

Without doubt BarCampLeeds was a successful event and, hopefully, more BarCamps will follow shortly in the North. While at times there was a sense that people were unsure what the nature and tone of the event ought to be, this is inevitable given the movement is in its early days and I am sure more people (myself included) will present next time having seen what a BarCamp looks like in practice. More to the point, BarCampLeeds pulled together a tremendous number of people in a very short time, all of whom signed up to the idea of participant lead event that shares ideas and knowledge on an opensource basis. In a field where commercial events are typically pitched at crazy price levels that was great to see and the energy and vision of the organisers was phenomenal. The low entry costs also resulted in a really interesting mix of people in terms of organisational and disciplinary backgrounds, though I reckon a few more of the social scientists working on the sociology of the internet (including some colleagues at York Uni!) would add nicely to the overall mix … which has me thinking whether a BarCampYork might be a possibility at some point in the near future…