Blog Every Day in June Day 14: It’s like Uber but for the Social Contract by Hugh Rundle

Today's post comes from Hugh Rundle's blog. Hugh is a librarian in Melbourne, and has been published over at In the Library with a Lead Pipe  and in the ALA's Planning Our Future Libraries: Blueprints for 2025. This piece was originally published to Hugh's website under the title It's like Uber but for the Social Contract.

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Governments throughout the Anglosphere have begun talking about ‘Digital First’ or ‘Digital by Default’ in the last couple of years. In 2012 President Obama launched the US Roadmap for Digital Government. The Cameron government in the UK launched the Government Digital Office in 2011 with the intention of delivering ‘digital by default’ government services. Here in Australia, Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull is a big proponent of this idea, launching the Digital Transformation Office a few weeks ago. Turnbull delights in visiting startup incubators to deliver soliloquies about how Government needs to become more responsive and support tech companies. The big idea of Digital by Default though, is that government departments should assume that the way people want to access information and services is online, with other channels a secondary consideration. In many ways this is a bit of a no-brainer; but there’s a catch. The great danger of digital first government is not that it will fail, but in how it measures success.

A concept that has become de rigeur in the software startup world is ‘user centred design’. This approach seeks to arrange the system around the needs and desires of the user, rather than forcing the user to adapt to the requirements of the system. If you’re thinking that sounds like the opposite of most interactions with government, you’re not alone. Indeed, virtually the first thing the Australian Government’s new Digital Transformation Office has done is release a Digital Service Standard for government departments, focussed on making their services user-centred. This is the first step governments need to understand when becoming ‘Digital by Default’. Unless the design of government services is ‘user centred’ digitising their delivery won’t make a whole lot of difference.

An example of this is eTax, the ATO’s software program introduced in 1999. eTaxwas only available for Windows PCs until 2013, and replicated the paper ‘Tax Pack’ forms. It was always clunky, and when a version for Macs was finally released in 2013, it was buggy and confusing to install. eTax may have been digital, but it certainly wasn’t a joy to use. Last year an alternative, in-browser system, MyTax,was finally introduced. MyTax is considerably easier to use, though the authentication process is still cumbersome, and last year it was only available for those with straightforward financial arrangements.

Reducing costs ...by passing them on to you

eTax did, at least, have the virtue of maintaining more or less the same usability of the paper Tax Pack. Other moves from State and Federal government to go digital have actually reduced usability. The Victorian Government annually publishes the Directory of Victorian Public Libraries. Until around 2008 this was produced and distributed in hard copy to all public libraries in the state. Then, the State Government suddenly discovered a desire to ‘reduce our environmental impact’ and announced that henceforth the Directory would be ‘published online’. What this means in practice is nine PDF files posted to an obscure web page. Of course, the only reason to publish something in PDF is if you want to retain the formatting so as to enable someone to print it out. Not exactly reducing paper use. Needless to say, the user experience of clicking and searching through nine PDF files rather than flicking to the dog-eared and specially coloured page in a hardcopy is significantly poorer.

The fate of the Directory of Victorian Public Libraries exemplifies what happens when governments go ‘digital by default’ for the wrong reason. It’s transparently the case that the Directory is ‘published’ as nine separate PDFs instead of one hardcopy because the State Government wants to pass on the printing costs to local Councils and library corporations. If the goal was to digitise in order to provide better service, it would have been turned into a searchable database.

This is how ‘digital by default’ currently works in Australian government. The goal is simply to reduce government overheads by passing the cost of production down the line. It’s Uber for Government. Just as Uber requires workers to provide and service their own vehicle, Government is looking to require citizens to BYO internet connection or smartphone in order to receive services. But this excludes those who need government support the most. Just as Uber simply ignores laws that it finds inconvenient, Digital by Default government aimed solely at reducing costs ignores citizens it finds inconvenient. Not only does this break the implicit rules of social democracy, it misunderstands the nature of many government services.

Friction

What we call reducing bureaucracy in government, increasing productivity in business, and removing friction in the app economy are all more or less the same thing - removing as many human interactions as possible. This might save money, but if you’re providing a service rather than a product it is very easy to take it past the point where service quality starts to diminish. Digital be Default needs to be squarely aimed at improving the quality of government services, rather than a way to treat Baumol’s cost disease. RFID in libraries is a good example of this. Library services focussed on reducing costs and becoming more efficient have introduced RFID as a way to reduce staff. Library services focussed on high quality service have introduced RFID in conjunction with new service models centred on interactions rather than transactions - retaining staff numbers but giving them more time to provide quality advice and experiences instead of merely transactions. Public libraries have always been more than mere book repositories. For many people, libraries are a place of refuge from a depressing and hostile world - a rare place with familiar faces and patient interlocutors. This is, as they say, a feature, not a bug.

Digital by Default must not lose sight of some of the positive outcomes from current government service provision. Whether we’re talking about food safety permits for restaurants, talking to real humans in public libraries, or minimum manufacturing standards for car brakes, it’s important to remember why we designed things that way in the first place. Sometimes when there’s no friction, people die.

Perspective

Turnbull, Cameron and Obama are all very rich white men in positions of power, but you merely need to be comfortably middle class to lose perspective. The same people who think public libraries were obsoleted by Google now call for all Government interactions to be appified, digitised and vaporised. Who wants to use the phone or go in and talk to a person anyway? People without your privilege - that’s who. The elderly, the illiterate, those without an internet connection and those who have simply run over their data limit for the month, people with complex combinations of needs that your software developer didn’t anticipate: these are the people who need to sit down with a real person. Seen from this angle, Digital by Default government - far from empowering citizens - breaks the very bonds that created social democracy in the first place.

So Digital by Default - sure, bring it on, people like me will love it. But your solution has to account for those who don’t or can’t love it, in a meaningful way that isn’t simply shoving them over to their local library to deal with (as so many state and federal government services do). It’s 2015 - the default way to get information and services from government should be digital, and it should be user-focussed and easy to use. But the non-default analogue option needs to exist, and be user-focussed and easy to use as well. Instead of Uber for the privileged and a once-a-day bus for the rest, let’s build government that’s like self-driving cars for everyone. Anything else is bullshit.

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Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) 

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Blog Every Day in June Day 21: Why Australia should sign the Marrakesh Treaty

Today's post has been contributed by Trish Hepworth who is the Executive Officer for the Australian Digital Alliance (ADA), as well as the Copyright Advisor for the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee. You can follow her on twitter @TrishHepworth

For the copyright geeks of this world (eg me) the decision in the Hathi Trust case had been keenly anticipated. The case centred on a group of university libraries who, with the help of Google, digitised books from their collection, making them searchable (but not viewable) online. The ruling, that this was a ‘fair use’ of copyright material was an important milestone in jurisprudence. 

For the rest of the world (ie the non-fair use copyright obsessed) it was an important mile-stone in disability access. One use that the libraries are making of the digitised copies is to provide accessible copies to people with visual disabilities. The digital books can be viewed by screen readers, undergo text-to-speech conversion or other conversion processes, making their content accessible by the blind and visually impaired (and those with other disabilities as well). This project, along with others such as project Gutenberg, are rapidly increasing the store of digital works available to the blind and visually impaired (BVIP). 

When you consider that only 7% of the world’s content is accessible to BVIP at the moment in developed countries, and much less than that in developing countries, you get an idea feel for the impact that these digital collections can have. However copyright law has an inconvenient way of stifling these project – either by prohibiting them at the national level (no exception to make accessible copies) or at the international level (no ability to share these works across borders). 

In steps the hero WIPO. Transforming from paper-pushing clerk to superhero, this caped crusader, ably assisted by her side-kick NGOs, facilitates agreement by the member states to an international treaty that would:

· Mandate national level exceptions to make accessible copies for the BVIP

· Allow those copies to be shared across borders

The treaty, known as the Marrakesh Treaty, was concluded last year. To date 65 countries, plus the EU and the Holy See, have signed. 

Australia has not – and we only have until the 26th before the Treaty will close to signatures. If we miss the deadline we can still join, but we’ll have to accede (a process the same as ratification) and we won’t have the kudos of being an original signatory. Not to mention the fact that this is a treaty of immense practical importance to the country’s BVIP. We should be signing ASAP! 

Libraries have been active in the negotiation, promotion and support of this treaty, and the representative bodies such as ALIA continue to work with our colleagues in the BVIP services areas to bring the matter to the attention of the government. For libraries, both those specialist BVIP libraries and the wider library body with collections to share and BVIP customers to serve, signing Marrakesh would be a great first step to increasing the accessible copies available to patrons. 

Let’s hope we sign, and ratify, in the next fortnight. 

-Trish Hepworth

Books for Everyone!

In recent times there has been a lot of discussion about ebooks, platforms, licensing etc. - but what about audiobooks?

There is something nice about listening to someone read a book to you; so long as the reader does not have an annoying voice it is a rather pleasant experience. I have recently come back from a rather long road trip and for me road trips are all about good snack food and really good book/s. Audio books are a pleasure because I am able to take something mundane and boring and make it something interesting and even enjoyable. This got me thinking: what about those people that cannot read books?
In the guardian there was a story of France leading the way on audiobooks for blind or visually impaired people, so kudos to the Association Valentin-Haüy (AVH) for making it happen.

Working in a rather specialised academic library there are very limited academic resources for those with visual impairment or other disability. In France in 2006 a law was passed requiring publishers to make their source available to certified organisations, enabling the latter to transcribe books into sound or braille - or digitally and paper - and to distribute them.

In Australia, Vision Australia has been working tirelessly to improve services for those with vision impairment and have a collection of fiction and non-fiction resources available on their website. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go in terms of academic resources.

I would also like to take this opportunity to say thank you to the public library that introduced me to the joy of audiobooks. Back in my high school days, when there were no more copies of Harry Potter on the shelf the friendly librarian showed me to their audio collection of Harry Potter read by Stephen Fry (sample here).

Please comment below on your experiences.

-Gabby