‘A++++!! Would vote again.’
User reviews build trust in digital services. Governments need trust to operate. How should we review governments?
I looked up my eBay score the other day. I remember getting my first review in 2004 felt rather exciting. The feedback system also made me feel more confident the tennis racket I’d ordered from a bloke in Guernsey would actually turn up. It did.
Twelve years later, his comments (‘Perfect! THANKS!!’) are among the billions propping up the web. I base my holidays and restaurant selections on TripAdvisor reviews. Kindle book selections. Taxis through Kabbee and Uber. Phone apps. Online recipes. Twitter followers are a sort of review system really, following the graph below.
Building trust on the basis of reviews and recommendations is not new. What’s different today is how much bang reviews get for their buck. We’ve become better at extracting the potential from all sorts of idling assets. Your spare room is now a hotel suite. Your savings are a source of start-up investment funds. In the same way, your opinions are gems to be mined by all. Reviews confer trust. Without trust, the Internet falls over.
Trust is important for governments too. Onora O’Neill’s Reith lectures in 2002 are very good on it. She opened with a great quote.
Confucius told his disciple Tsze-kung that three things are needed for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can’t hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end. Without trust we cannot stand.
Existing trust-building review systems in government are usually led by experts, not users. The Care Quality Commission, Ofsted, even the digital service standard — all examples of the government applying specific smarts to keep other parts of the system honest.
Reading the O’Neill lectures got me wondering about whether a complementary user review system would work for public services, especially digital ones. Would it actually lead to improved services or greater trust?
There’s already a public service review system in the UK, of course — elections. Unfortunately, for all its virtues, democracy is basically a waterfall process; a long requirements document drawn up in advance (the manifesto), a fixed 5 year contract with costly exit clauses (parliamentary terms), passed on to a monopolistic systems integrator (the Civil Service). The economist Tim Harford pointed out this week that the Budget is a similarly weird annual appraisal of the Chancellor.
The other difficulty is the weak connection between public service quality and votes. When did you last cast your vote on the basis of a smooth passport application?
It sounds like it would be great if user reviews worked for state-run services. They could generate a steady stream of real-time democratic feedback. They could provide a view unfiltered by spin. The thousands of civil servant hours spent marking their own homework could go towards fixing things.
Government is often described as a machine. Perhaps that’s an issue when it comes to reviews. Certainly if you believe AirBnB’s UK General Manager, who reckons that what turns a 4-star review into a 5-star review is positive human interaction. That echoes his business model, but if it’s true, raises an interesting question. Could user reviews encourage governments to be more human?
In this utopian ideal, user reviews would build a stronger connection between citizens and the state. A virtuous feedback loop that uses the opinions of all to create better schools, surgeries and services.
I’d like to be challenged on this, but unfortunately I don’t think user reviews are the answer for governments.
We’ll get the obvious out the way first. Review systems are a market making mechanism; they sort the wheat from the bollocks in a competitive environment. Government services generally don’t have to worry about this. Tumbleweed gathers in the corners of websites like iWantGreatCare and RateMyTeacher for good reason.
The second problem is that user reviews tend to be dominated by those with the loudest voices. They are also prone to manipulation, sockpuppetry and astroturfing. That doesn’t sound very democratic (although perhaps more diffuse than a mass media conversation).
Thirdly, research suggests that online reviewers have a strong incentive to hold extreme opinions. Combine that with the febrile nature of politics, and feel the warm heat of those incoming flames. Turning that into constructive feedback will be a challenge.
None of those criticisms are decisive. And the need for trust in governments will never go away. Copying the eBay or AirBnB review model wholesale for digital public services sounds like a non-starter, but learning from it shouldn’t be. There are two things I’d love to see.
A general election where setting out a realistic vision for great public services is a decisive issue — like, you know, a proper review. Ha, you say, not bloody likely. I’m blindly optimistic, but yeah, you’re probably right.
I’ll settle at the moment for every public service designer— every public servant really, locally and nationally — thinking hard about delivering trust. How to create it when trying new and scary things. And how to protect that trust, day in, day out.
Government has lost a fair bit already. If it disappeared, we’d really miss it.
@ad_greenway — retweets, comments and abuse actively welcomed.
