At the October VRM Hub meeting, I spoke briefly about my own perceptions of VRM, and re-affirmed my thesis that VRM should be seen as a means of improving peoples’ happiness rather than simply a tool for data control freaks. Not, of course, should the latter group be excluded, but the ramifications of even thinking about VRM in the context of large organisations go far beyond better data exchange mechanisms. Carrie has posted some notes from my talk on the VRM Hub blog, which provide an excellent summary – and save me from repeating things here.

Alec Muffett also captured the meeting on video, and I’ve embedded the first of the series below – it’s worth watching the others, too, to see the entirety of the discussion.

Download this video in QuickTime format (54.8Mb)

Videos from the Unlocking the see-saw conference are forthcoming, and so I’ll withold a more egocentric report until they arrive. In the meantime, Doc Searls’ photos of the event should provide ample distraction.

For more on what was talked about, take a look at these posts from Jonathan MacDonald, Richard Muscat, Graham Sadd and this from Alan Patrick:

There is a debate about whether VRM can be executed by the users alone, or whether it needs to tempt suppliers to collaborate (ie either the gross value of serving all those VRM'ers is sufficienly alluring, vs. There has to be a giveaway to make suppliers use it). Any supplier will have to invest in new equipment /processes to serve VRM customers, so will be looking at +ve ROI.

One thing which excites me about VRM is the fact that some of the implementation can be remarkably lightweight. I’d argue that it’s investment in processes which is where large organisations will struggle. Smaller ones, on the other hand, ought to be able to take this stuff and run.

Nudge is Thaler and Sunstein’s first foray into ‘pop econ’, and it deserves applause for its foisting of otherwise controversial economic theory [1] into the mainstream. It introduces the pioneering work of Kahneman and Tversky, along with other like minded thinkers – including Thaler himself – in the form of a readable and accessible frolic in the field of behavioural economics.

Refreshingly – and, as a text aimed at a popular audience, as it is entitled to – it avoids the long-fought academic arguments which centre around the validity of behavioural theory itself. Instead, it playfully introduces the core tenets of much of the last twenty years’ thinking: loss aversion, choice anchoring, the status quo bias, rules of thumb and the ‘two system’ model of choice. Comprehensive examples in the second half of the text (e.g. Prescription Drugs: Part D for Daunting) convince the reader of the importance of good choice architecture, or at least the importance of thinking about choice architecture, and the book concludes with a plea to consider more fully the role good choice editing might play in determining the effectiveness of government policy.

An otherwise likeable text is marred by Thaler and Sunstein’s seemingly compulsive over-enthusiasm. The endless political references turn an otherwise neutral economic study into a frustrating battle, with the reader forced to make continual assessments of its validity. They divert attention away from the core economic message, diluting its credibility. Additionally, the lexical choice occasionally borders on the cultish – ‘nudges are everywhere’ – which again prompts the reader to question the soundness of the underlying theory. All of this is quite unnecessary, and a reader familiar with the subject matter is left wondering whether the book would have been more convincing to the lay person, if perhaps not as provocative, had it been couched in less partisan terms.

A final warning: As the authors state in the conclusion, ‘choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions’ – but good choice architecture itself doesn’t preclude the need for substantive thinking about the desired outcome of choice problems, though unwary readers might be tempted to think so. Nudge should be seen as a book about process and people, and not policy or purpose. Nevertheless, as an invitation to improve processes, it is a welcome addition to the popular economics canon.

1. Those with an interest in some of the ‘serious’ writing on the subject are invited to read Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize Lecture (PDF) and acquire Kahneman and Tversky’s excellent Choices, Values, and Frames (2000, Cambridge University Press) which features some of Thaler’s academic papers.

Interesting that most of the conversation about this video focuses on Tokyo, where apparently they have loads of these. They’re not that uncommon in the UK, too. Just saying.

Watch this space for more details on my talk.

The Power of Information Taskforce understands communications priorities:

Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

— Richard Allan, Task Force Chair

The Show Us a Better Way project is a laudable attempt to open up UK government data sources — and it’s good to see a number of government agencies joining in too.

Two bits of previously locked-up government data you can now get your hands on:

The Postcode Address File — this behemoth maps UK postcodes to addresses, including address aliases, Welsh language equivalents and sub-addresses for buildings with more than one. Instructions on how to get a sample are on the Show Us a Better Way website, though amusingly the only way of getting the sample data is on a CD in the post. So much for progress.

Transport Direct data — I've only just requested access to this so haven't had a chance to look around, but the content looks promising in principle: ‘Location of bus stops, stations etc and descriptions of the locations; The National Car Park Register; Journey planning information; A carbon calculator; The National Public Transport Data Repository feed’

It’ll be interesting to see how the competition goes (there’s £20,000 up for grabs) — and I’ll be particularly keen to see how many iPhone apps emerge which make use of this data.

Villu moves from Skype to become the new CEO of Hill & Knowlton Estonia. Filling his shoes in the blogging role will be a challenge, but one I’m very much looking forward to.

I’ll be hosting two sessions at reboot10 in Copenhagen this week: the first, an exploration of the societal, entrepreneurial and personal benefits of freeing government data. The second will (I hope) end up as a conversation about the benefits of a move from consultative to collaborative modes of working across public and private sectors.

My pseudo mission statement for the conference is up on the Reboot site — I’m thinking of giving it a permanent home here somewhere, too.

Some stuff from around the web on Reboot: a pre-conference interview with David Weinberger; word of mouth via trackback (I love them, still); Twitter buzzing away.

Also coming up in the next week or so, a comparison between the very different styles of conferencing: Seed vs. Reboot.

On the other hand, while my experiences with City Link haven’t been as bad as Alan’s, I’ve never felt like my deliveries were being handled with a great degree of competence. Certainly the concept of customer service seems to elude them.

In a way, it’s a hostage scenario — Amazon doesn’t allow you to specify a delivery partner, and so you’re essentially stuck with their choice. City Link have no incentive to help the people they deliver to, as they’re paid by Amazon, not the recipients. Amazon are unlikely to axe City Link until the volume of complaints warrants an investigation.

Could be tricky. In the meantime, it seems that they use Royal Mail for Amazon Prime shipments, so I should escape the ‘services’ of City Link for the time being.

The attraction of the OnePulse card is that it combines an Oyster card with Visa’s payWave contactless payment system, allowing you — in theory — to make cashless small value payments without having to remove the card from your wallet or enter a PIN.

Of course, in practice, this is impossible, simply because no-one has installed the necessary contactless card readers. I thought I spied one through the window of a Yo! Sushi restaurant in the Brunswick centre, but I’m not sure it actually exists. My enquiry to EAT about when they’d be installing theirs was met with the following fascinatingly detailed response:

Thanks for taking the time to contact EAT. We plan to implement Wave and Pay in all our sotres by the end of the Summer.

It’s nice to see them taking the time to spell check their customer service emails (never mind the confusion around what the contactless payment technology is called) — and I’ll be impressed if they manage to achieve that objective. Some of their shops don’t take cards — an annoying inconsistency when you’re in a hurry and don’t have any cash; how is one supposed to determine a card-accepting EAT from one which doesn’t — and I’d imagine there’s a certain amount of staff training which will need to be done.

Interestingly, their rivals Pret have taken a slightly different approach, partnering with HSBC to process small value transactions with no PIN requirement. This seems to be commonplace in Sweden, for example, and while it does require card contact it reduces transaction processing time.

Why the delay to introduce contactless payment terminals at EAT, though? David Evans suggest that uptake of contactless payment has been slow because retailers are ‘ignorant or unpersuaded’. In this case, however, it’s clear that EAT is neither ignorant or unpersuaded — or perhaps they were persuaded back in 2007 and have since reprioritised the rollout.

I’m not sure who needs to push who here — it’s likely that Barclays had/have some contractual relationship with the partner retailers announced at the OnePulse launch; have these relationships gone sour? It certainly doesn’t make Barclays’ own marketing any easier. Alternatively, perhaps a bigger shakeup of the payments industry is required before we see real adoption of technologies like payWave.