Monday, May 25, 2015

The most underused eGovernment transparency feature: notifications

If you perform online activities, you encounter notifications in both everyday routine interactions and in emergencies. Some notifications use the telephone system, TV or radio, or road signs.

Common examples include:
1. email notification when a password is changed on an email or a social media account
2. email notification that a new credit card bill is available, in online banking
3. alerts on TV and radio (tornadoes, disasters)
4. popup windows in software, such as for a new program version or a computer virus alert
5. newsletters or digests (consolidated information)
6. newsletters and alerts from a school
7. alerts on digital road signs (Amber alerts, "vamos Argentina" soccer match alerts, bear and zombie warnings)

For a pretty good summary of notifications, see this Wikipedia page.

If you are a very social person, have a family, a few club memberships and do lots of shopping online, you may at times feel swamped by the number of notifications and alerts you receive.

Nowadays, even most government agencies send out newsletters and Twitter messages in addition to letting you view and pay bills and taxes online.

So, why would we claim that government does not use notifications well or in a manner that improves transparency?

To understand the claim, we need to talk a little about processes or "workflow".  They are not exactly the same but close enough for the purpose of this post and they mean "the steps performed to get something done".

The whole world consists of workflows! From getting up in the morning and making a coffee to the steps you just took to arrive on this web page, workflows are everywhere.
Some are highly regulated and mandatory (and if you don't like them, you often call these bureaucratic), others are less strict (for example, you generally have a choice of clothes after getting out of bed to get to the coffee machine).

In the old days, you'd take a pencil and a paper and put boxes (description of a step) on it, then draw lines (or arrows), often with intermediate boxes (conditions, branches).

Nowadays, you can scan these documents and publish them on the web, especially if they look like a child's drawing of a spaghetti meal.
For real work, you use specialized software with "swim lanes", start and end points, connectors and all sorts of pieces (often called "lego" blocks but in reality often more like individually handcrafted blocks, the "artisanal" components done by all those software ninjas out there).

Notifications are essential to this software. Notifications can be either between pieces of software without users ever seeing them ("services", "alerts") or from software to human (e.g. "your order is ready") and even from human to software (e.g. send an email with the subject "unsubscribe") make the difference between a system that works and one that does not.

To understand the difference between notifications by government agencies and other entities, let's look at this simple example.

Online order processing
Even the smallest online retailers in the flatlands outside of the  K-Landnews hill country normally send at least these notifications: order confirmation, order fulfillment started, order shipped, feedback request.
If there are problems or delays, you will receive specific additional notifications.

eGovernment
Unless you happen to live in the handful of countries at the cutting edge of eGovernment (such as Estonia), you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to notifications on completed steps within a workflow.
Standard government notifications tend to be "start/end" or one off.
For example, if you eFile your tax return, a message that the return was received will be all you get. After that, you'll get the tax return or a visit by an audit team.
If you pay road tolls electronically, you'll get bill at the end of the month either with or without itemized pay events.

But most importantly, when the government accesses and processes "your" data, you tend to receive no notification whatsoever.

For example, take license plate readers: when you pass a toll booth without paying, your license plate is scanned. The scan performs optical character recognition of the image, takes the recognized license plate and compares it to the state DMV records and finally sends a nastygram to the person or entity shown as the registered owner of the vehicle.

Why don't they send an email or an SMS text to you if they have this contact information in the database?

Especially if the nastygram (pay or else) takes three weeks from the time of the alleged violation to your front door, leaving your wonder where exactly your car was three weeks ago, when you know you have never been to this place a thousand miles away.

Other examples of "why not?" include expiration of an alien registration card in Germany. At the minimum, it is a misdemeanor if it expires and you show up a day later to apply for an extension. They do have at least a phone number and usually also an email address in their databases, so why does nobody program a trigger (two or three lines of code) that reminds you a few before the expiration? Under development in, yes, Estonia.

Germany's new data retention law
Germany is currently rushing through a new law that requires telecom and internet providers to save call data and internet data for up to ten weeks. This is similar to the U.S. Patriot Act Section 215.
While some data can be accessed without telling you about it, the juicy data come with the  requirement to notify the subscriber before accessing the data.
Guess what is happening even before the law is passed?
Some politicians want to do away with this requirement completely while others want to move it to some later date.

The simple point about governments collecting data about your movement (license plate readers, toll cards) and your communications (telephone and internet) is that notification would be extremely easy in the vast majority of cases at almost no cost.

Reasons for not notifying citizens include plain incompetence, stupidity, lots and lots of politics, and a dismal view of humans, neither of which we feel like discussing on this sunny spring day.

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