Making government data machine (and human) readable

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David Carboni

Please don’t be alarmed

• This talk is lighthearted
• ONS is doing awesome things
• With Python
• With data
• With people

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• Take this with a pinch of salt

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Who am I?

A journey

ONS

The challenge

• Deliver a major UK website
• With leading-edge tech
• In a risk-averse organisation
• In a year
• In Wales

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• Go Wales!

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Harsh words

In December 2012, the organisation’s then new website providing statistics to the public was described as “a disaster” by members of parliament on the Public Administration Committee. The chair of the UK Statistics Authority said that significant improvements to the website were being made but admitted that its state at the time made it “difficult to use, difficult to navigate and difficult to search”.

• Wikipedia

Fortunately

• Love you guys

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• Rarely has so much been owed by so many to so few

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And

• Marvellous devops tech
• Automate all the things
• Open source
• Open standards
• Open platforms

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• Developer experience

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Iterating

ONS 2014

The 90s called...

they want their site back.

Alpha

ONS 2015

ONS 2016

..and we’re

Live

So.. what?

• A website. Yay.
• Docker’s cool, but.. Really?
• A fantastic turnaround
• Look deeper and there’s more

Data

Sexy

Sexy

Data

Data:

front

and

centre

Architecture

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Just kidding

Tech Design

Simplicity takes discipline

• The discipline of being concrete, specific and clear leaves you nowhere to hide. The clarity and focus that creates makes delivery possible.

• Keep it simple. Excitement about new ideas is not an excuse for complexity and duplication.

Do less.

Simple: hard

It takes courage

• Complexity will find you
• It sneaks in on you at night
• Start embarrassingly simple
• And keep pruning

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• Complexity will find you. And it will kill you.

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Microservices

Florence Nightingale

• Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing.
• She also helped popularise the graphical presentation of statistical data.

People

High performing teams

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Leadership

• “The real role of leadership is not command and control, but climate control. People rise to it and achieve things you couldn't have expected” Sir Ken Robinson

• It doesn’t matter how fun and amazing your project is, if people don’t feel safe — they won’t contribute.

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Get out of the way

• “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.” –Stephen R. Covey, Author

• “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.” Washington

Teams

People power

• Be courageous, be human, be vulnerable. Put into practice that violating values is serious and inappropriate behaviour

• Two anchors that allow a dream team to happen: uncomfortable transparency and real autonomy. Simple, therefore hard

Productive dissent

• “Pride is concerned with who is right, humility is concerned with what is right” Ezra T Benson

• “Think big, start small, ask forgiveness not permission, no one changed the world by being reasonable.” Tony Browne, Futuregov

Distilled

• Technology is not the story
• Complexity is conceit
• Autonomy
• Clarity
• Shared direction
• Common good

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• Work hard, be kind
• Ego kills
• Get out of the way
• Abundance
• We’re in this together
• Trust is courage is vulnerability

Digital

Digital

• Digital is not IT. It’s not even technology. Digital is about designing for a world of abundance: where information can be replicated and exchanged at near zero cost.

• The industrial revolution released massive value by automating physical work. In the same way the digital revolution is breaking and reshaping our world through automation of information processes.

Reaction

The stats world said

• Wow
• UK national data
• Machine readable
• And human readable too

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And some people noticed

• Matthew Hancock MP
• The Queen (wow!)
• Welsh Government - St David Awards

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Keynote speech

Take the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) website, once described in the FT as a ‘national embarrassment’. A small, highly skilled team built a new alpha version in 3 months and it went live just before Christmas. The feedback has been fantastic, and the ONS team are about to finish their beta version, catering to the needs of everyone from A-level students to academic economists, at a fraction of the cost of the original.

— Rt Hon Matthew Hancock MP, Cabinet Office and GDS

Dedication

But most of all

• A wonderful team
• Laura Dewis
• Matt Jukes
• Julie Peters
• A lot of trust
• A lot of care

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Outtakes

A few favourites

A few favourites

A few favourites

A few d

A few favourites

A few favourites

A few favourites

Thank you!

• I’m @davidcarboni
• github.com/davidcarboni
• Come and talk to me
• I’m human
• And I’m always looking for good people

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Copyright 2015 Methods Digital Limited

This document is the property of Methods Digital Limited. It shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, nor disclosed to a third party, without prior written permission. No responsibility or liability is accepted for any errors or omissions in this document or related documents.

methodsdigital.co.uk 

david.carboni@methods.co.uk

07967 025 805

16 St. Martin’s Le Grand

London EC1A 4EN

Bruce Dern/Lowell Freeman

“I didn’t want anyone to be intimidated. So I insisted on that every day that there be an atmosphere of the utmost creation for everybody and I took the fall when that didn’t happen. So there were no tempers, there was no ego, there were no tantrums. It was just courtesy, everybody was courteous, everybody was kind everybody was, it sounds corny, but sweet. There’s nobody who worked on this movie who won’t tell you it wasn’t one of the best experiences of their lives.”

Digital Culture

• The business operating system - our assumptions about best practice, how we motivate people - is built around extrinsic motivators: carrots and sticks. For knowledge work however, mechanistic reward-and-punishment doesn't work, and often does harm. Once a task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill, direct rewards lead to poorer performance.
• There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Too many organizations are making decisions and policy about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. The solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.
• Intrinsic motivation - the desire to do things because they matter, because they're interesting, or part of something important: science has given us this new approach.
• Dan Pink

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Website

Publishing

Images courtesy of...

• Stock Up: https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up
• Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/
• Wikipedia
• Film, Television, Art, Books and The Magic Roundabout images shamelessly borrowed from Google Images. Fair use?
• Company logos and user profile pictures from Twitter, Github and Google images.

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