WILL 2012 be the year Scotland’s management class transforms services by embracing social media? I can feel curiosity levels and hackles rising instantly – in equal measure. Yes, tweeting about the truly banal has become a new social norm. Yes, Rory Bremner might have won Strictly Come Dancing if lovers of satire were better at organising The Social Vote. And yes, there are far more pressing problems facing public service managers in 2012 like cuts, unemployment, climate change and matching welfare budgets with the way we live today – not the way our parents lived yesterday. Yet not a single “top priority” problem can be solved without a radically new approach to the potential for mass collaboration and personalisation of service offered by the internet and social media.
Already, the way we search for travel information has changed. It’s no longer a one-way street where authorities give and the public passively receives – it’s a collaborative effort based on our innate impulse to share and the rational belief that people on the spot probably know some things better than official websites updated last week. Imagine if all mobile phone users agreed to tweet urgent travel updates about accidents, ice, floods and snow using a hashtag formula like #A9accident. We could all have innovation, collaboration and better information free – overnight. If we all used twitter. If some body like the government decided to lead the way.
The area for revolutionary improvement, though, is health. A country with bad housing, low educational attainment and poor social engagement will have upwardly-spiralling health costs. Awareness of that inter-relationship has prompted the creation of professional umbrella groups, departmental reorganisations and billboard poster campaigns. Why hasn’t it prompted direct collaboration with the public?
Last week I came across an interesting site – Patientslikeme.com. Yes, everything about it shrieks danger. The site makes money through large online patient user groups who post regular updates on their condition, symptoms and treatments and suggest new research areas. The site’s policy director, British motor neurone disease (MND) specialist Dr Paul Hicks, demonstrates what such a group can achieve in a ten-minute video posted on Youtube. He takes a simple question – is it normal for a patient with MND to have severe depression – and tries to find an “expert” answer in the medical oracle PubMed.
This American database produces 159 results of which only 23 contain data and two contain advice. Without his own professional knowledge and access rights, Hicks estimates the search would take a lay person days of reading and hundreds of pounds. Collating evidence from every study conducted since 1977 he finds the incidence of severe depression among early MND patients is anywhere between 0 and 70 per cent. Hardly useful – and some studies have used only 18 patients. His own website has a user group of 2,500 MND patients that has been delivering online information about their symptoms for two years. Only 5 per cent experience severe depression.
Yes, this site is run by a private, profit-making company based in the US. It could just as easily be run by NHS Fife.
The challenge posed by online communities like these is simple. If findings like these are useful and reliable how much more might we know if first-hand experience on health, educational, transport and social problems was carefully gathered by the public bodies we finance to run Scotland?
The obstacles to expanding collaborative knowledge are not technical – they are human. Elitists judge the value of information by the social status, age (and usually gender) of its source. BBC research in the 1990s found only the over-50s tended to respect views delivered like tablets of stone by the great and good. Under-50s expected to hear a variety of views. Today, 15 years later, the vast majority of the public shares that more egalitarian outlook.
So do we believe five million equally motivated heads must be better than one? The problem now is not so much the elitist boss as the unplayful one – the manager who believes there must be an inverse relationship between fun and knowledge, the educationist who talks about outdoor play for kids and then finds all sorts of “caring” reasons why it can’t be done. The worried few who rarely use their full holiday entitlement.
This group presents a serious obstacle to the empowerment of society in part because they don’t know who they are. I do. They are overly earnest people like me – on a bad day.
They are the folk running grim, non-interactive government and health service websites. They are professionals who think the “communication” box is ticked by leaving piles of leaflets in libraries. They are the worried managers whose own children could make more amusing, accessible videos on every aspect of public information – how to change bicycle tyres, bake bread, fill in “complicated” STV voting forms or remember your physiotherapy exercises.
We need a new outlook that presumes well-mediated online public user groups produce wisdom not gossip. A presumption that every member of the public can overcome fear of the internet when the benefits are made clear and cost is minimal. A presumption that data protection laws should make sharing of health information standard. The “wilful failure to share vital data” must become as serious a professional and academic offence as breaching patient confidentiality.
What’s the upside of all this for Scotland? Just as the best players don’t necessarily make the best managers, digital natives don’t necessarily devise the best social media platforms for the general public. Digital doubters are needed to “proof” every plan – and we have them in spades. The much-viewed Hurricane Bawbag and Big Man videos also prove the Scots capacity to find world-sharing moments of humour in everyday situations. Connect that popular creativity and un-tapped public expertise with IT wizardry and professional excellence in most of the areas that pull Scotland down and Scots could make the world of collaborative problem-solving our own. Happy 2012.
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