Shooting from the lip

health and fitness, high school.

Learning to drive, safety and self-defence, family planning. Further education and skills training, financial planning, parenting, family health. And more. All plotted on that “S” of life’s path.

On that journey, each individual will take innumerable decisions. Based on abundant factors at play.

As the primary custodian of constitutional rights, government could ask itself a foundational question: “What information do we have; which could enable every person; to take the most informed decisions; across all aspects of their lives?”

This takes us to a famous quote. May 2010: “We will unleash a tsunami of data.” – by Rohan Silva, a policy adviser to David Cameron and a true radical. He drove the UK government’s open data policy, first authorised by Gordon Brown.

The principle behind releasing even “messy” data-sets is “if you release it, they will build it” – ie: the private sector. And that “sunlight would drive improvements in the data itself ” (Guardian, April 30, 2013). Let’s test the theory: If Thomas Hobbes was correct, in the year 1649, that “the first duty of the state is to provide law and order”, then a visit to www.police.uk is instructive. It shows how data can offer the best possible “business intelligence”, for every person.

Sharing data then informs the creation of smart tools, to help make sense of that tsunami of data – to help us to identify every risk, every opportunity. Then monitor progress, incentivise, reward and hold various partners to account, too. A virtual enabling environment. Such a collaboration would draw together our finest minds – multi-disciplinary expertise, experience, risk analysis, analytics, systems thinking, forecasting, problem-solving, etc.

The outcomes would have to pass simple tests: Is this useful? Can this be trusted? And is it relevant?

In conclusion: if each human being had access to “the best we know”;

Was thus enabled to take the most informed decisions;

Then: would each human being be more resilient? More free to be? More likely to self-actualise? Their whole life through?