ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

I'm beginning to wonder, quite seriously, whether the party that really "gets" technology will win the next election. And I don't just mean the current escalating efforts to see who can do a better job of crime maps and other types of mash-up using the likes of Virtual Earth and Google Earth.

After all, none of this is new: the idea of opening up public sector data and providing open interfaces dates back to at least the 1990's and over the years many of us have tried to chivvy things along, notably IdealGovernment and mySociety. And of course the US and others have been there before us (and hopefully we'll be smart enough to learn from their lessons, such as the naive mistakes some made in publishing detailed crime figures that went right down to identifying individual properties. Ouch).

All of which perhaps proves the point I've often made that it takes 10-20 years from IT innovation to mainstream understanding and adoption (which places us at about the halfway point towards what we wanted to happen back in the 1990s, so I guess in another 10 years I'll finally see some of the outcomes I've long been waiting for).

Neither too do I mean just the type of smart use of the Internet and the Web that is attributed with having helped Barack Obama's campaign in motivating the technorati to become more engaged with the political process in the US.

Of course, all of these aspects are important in ensuring that technology plays a positive role in our society. But they're not my main focus when I consider the question of whether technology could swing the balance at the next general election.

No, what I mean is that I see a growing and serious appetite in some quarters to take onboard the lessons about how technology needs to become part of policymaking itself at its inception rather than as something to be thought about afterwards (generally, it seems, in terms of constructing large, monolithic, centralised databases that appear to be modelled on a 1960's "Boys Own" understanding of how computers work).

What I sense is an appetite among some politicians and advisors for a better understanding of how technology can fundamentally alter the very nature of policymaking itself. When, that is, it is properly understood prior to and during the policymaking period, rather than, as at present, something you throw at implementation of a policy downstream. Yet all too often technology seems relegated to little more than the digital age equivalent of the typewriter and the filing cabinet, and narrow discussions focused on cyclic technology fads rather than user needs and long-term strategy.

Information technology has great transformational potential across our society. In particular, it has the power to transform education, healthcare, and the economic development of our future Britain. Yet current policy-making all too often continues much as it did before the advent of the current digital age.

Technologists, policymakers and civil society need to find a new way of communicating and working together to decide just how our new digital age should be shaped. And what sort of world we want to live in over the next five, ten, twenty and more years.

We are about to experience a change as dramatic as if we were moving directly from the Stone Age into the Industrial Age. Yet this coming technological revolution is little understood and little prepared for. If the UK is to take true advantage of this coming era, we need to understand technology's potential far better (and, equally, we need to be honest about its propensity for more "toxic" outcomes). We need to challenge our long-held, reactionary instincts about the nature of society and how we live, learn, work and play. And we need everyone to understand far more clearly the implications of this era and how technology can be harnessed for good, enhancing our wellbeing, security, privacy, prosperity and society.

I think it was the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who first used the phrase "the white heat of technology": adopting technology as a true technology lever and as an inspiration for improved policymaking. That vision has waned in the intervening years and some forty-something years later here in the UK we still may not have achieved "most wired nation" status (as South Korea has), but we are finally seeing serious levels of broadband penetration, ensuring more and more of the UK has higher speed access to the Internet.

Like the impact of the railways and later the roads, as this infrastructure becomes embedded across the country, it will set in motion a chain of changes beyond anything we might imagine today.

I'm going to use a few of my upcoming blogs to set out ideas for how we might deliver the type of technology-enabled policymaking in key areas such as economic development, healthcare and education. The sort of vision I allude to in my "manifesto for technology" teaser (requires Silveright).

In a world where the UK's competitors are making smart use of digital technologies, relegating technology to a secondary function of merely assisting with administration and operational processes is no longer a sustainable method of policymaking.

Technology belongs in the policymaking forge itself: at the very centre of the whiteheat.

Watch this space ... and I look forward to a lively, informed discussion.

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