Another email drops into the inbox of The Voice from A Liberal Democrat Organiser Who Wishes To Remain Anonymous: “Another submission for you good chaps. Occasionally I worry about being too vituperative about party issues on a public forum. Then I remember that I’m a monkey, so what do I care?” You can read the first part of the Lib Dem Riso Monkey’s diary here.
There are many things I dislike about EARS (Electoral Agent Record System, the Lib Dems’ in-house electoral database). It’s absurdly over-complicated, yet grossly under-documented. Various parts of the programme require you to go in, go out, and then go in again, like some sort of electronic hokey-cokey. Many of its ‘features’ require a full reset of the machine, just to avoid access conflicts.
Yet the part that proves to be the biggest drain upon productivity are its gratingly condescending helpdesk staff. It’s got to the point where my intern refuses to talk to ‘those awful people’. Thus it was that Monday morning saw me making my near-monthly call to the inventor of EARS, who I have begun to call JayJay.
“…So, JayJay, in order to get the damn thing to work, I have to switch off my machine, smash it with a hammer, and then glue the parts back together again? Is that what a ‘hard reset’ means?”
“Err, no, you just need to turn it off and on again, obviously. It’s not really a problem with EARS, more to do with Windows. You just need to restart the OS.”
“Is this going to be fixed soon?”
“It’ll be done in EARS 9, so we’re not planning to patch in a fix in any time in the near future.”
Ah, EARS 9. It’s been in the works for so long that it’s acquired semi-mythical status. Apparently it’ll be online, easily accessible from anywhere, and actually go and knock on doors for you. We’ve been waiting for it for so long that I suspect its coming will be one of the signs of the apocalypse. I can see it now…
It’s the day of the release of EARS 9, which is being beamed directly into the heads of activists up and down the land. Suddenly, the display flickers, and goes out. JayJay puts his finger on the nuclear button and says, “No, there’s nothing wrong with EARS, we just need to reset the world.”
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20 Comments
This is harsh. The party would be lost without EARS and I have never found the people behind it to be anything other than helpful.
It is harsh, but there’s a certain amount of truth in it. Often the instructions from people helping are not clear – that said, they’re a small company doing a fantastic job to provide a piece of software that largely does what I want it to, for not that much money.
It may be harsh, but it is completely true. I personally would much prefer to pay two or three times the price for a properly developed systems with no conflicts with Windows (it’s not as if Windows is a fringe product after all). In addition, support should mean support – it should be clear and not condescending/borderline rude.
Let this be the start of the rebellion – no longer should we be reliant on second or third best – it’s time for a change, and that change is a move from EARS to a more robust and flexible system, with a helpdesk that’s not a contradiction in terms.
Seriously, if any local parties were to invest together in developing alternatives, there would be lots of other takers!
I glad others have said this, I thought I was alone in being made to feel small and stupid whenever I ring the helpdesk.
I always come off the phone feeling apologetic for having bothered them and still none the wiser.
As well as actually knocking on the doors for you, I’m told EARS V9 will also be able to tell a person’s likely voting intention by merging their second name with their Mosaic category.
It seems that there are a lot of people silently thinking the same things about the frustrations of EARs. It’s strange that despite this, it seems like a given. Even if v9 lives up to all of its promises, it will undoubtedly bring many new issues. Isn’t it time we dealt with th real problem which is EARS itself, rather than trying to patch over the issues? Whatever the changes to the system – the issues regarding the chronic lack of documentation and the poor support for the product will remain. No commercial product would survive with these low standards, yet EARs has cornered the market in Lib Dem circles, pushing local systems out of use. We need to think bigger and demand more (including looking elsewhere) otherwise I’m sure we’ll all be silently frustrated ten years from now.
I do find that EARS is a useful product, that most of the features can be used without having to reset the computer, and that 9 times out of 10 I can get what I want out of it.
Nonetheless I have serious concersn with the current version. It is clunky, the filters are fiddly and in many cases very difficult to customise to the complexity that pool mailings often require, and the statistical analysis functions leave a lot to be desired.
If these functions can be updated without massively increasing the costs of the software (Party funding, anybody?) they would do a lot to increase the efficiency of our campaigns.
We need a new system. End of.
Why can’t the party set out our needs and invite tenders? Leave it up to companies / individuals to design solutions that meet what we are looking for. EARS could, of course, put in a bid, so could others.
At the moment we are over-reliant on a system that simply doesn’t work well.
Ah, but if we reset the world, would there be a need for EARS?
Don’t like EARS? No-one has ever stopped anyone going out and writing, marketing and supporting an alternative. The fact that no-one has for the last decade suggests that it isn’t quite as easy as people would like to suggest.
The last time I used EARS “in anger” was 2004. The rolling updates of marked registers from the council were produced in a particularly odd format which no-one else was using. EARS wrote a patch to translate those within a day or two.
Of course it’s easier to make snide anonymous criticisms.
“It is clunky, the filters are fiddly and in many cases very difficult to customise to the complexity that pool mailings often require, and the statistical analysis functions leave a lot to be desired.”
I would agree with this – but that is in part because campaigning techniques develop quicker than the program does. And I think that was ever thus, I remember it being pretty clunky to produce split election addresses in 97.
There is a case that EARS should only attempt basic statistics in any case and just allow export of data to spreadsheets for more detailed analysis as they are the tool designed for number crunching. This is how I’ve been doing it since about 1995.
Incidentally, running EARS under Parallels/XP on a Mac it’s more stable than the commercial PagePlus IMO.
I think the point is that no one has bothered to develop an alternative because the easy option is always to keep things as they always have been, which means we’ll continue to get what we’ve always had!
While I accept that it’s not easy to develop a well thought out alternative, I can’t accept that it’s not possible. I myself work in IT and systems development, and I’m sure that within the party alone we have the expertise to develop a better solution. A fair solution to me would ne to develop a spec and go out to tender.
We are all reliant on EARS and it is critical to how we function on the ground. When a system is critical, it is particularly important that it is also robust – and that includes the relevant documentation and support, as well as the system itself.
This thread shows that there are concerns. I don’t think anyone is overtly anti-EARS itself, it appears people want more from it. A tendering process would be a fair way of achieving these objectives – and a way of seeing if EARS are willing to step up to the plate.
Ah, but Hywel, there are many companies which have gone out and written an alternative. Labour have had an online system constructed for them by Experian. The Tories use Voter Vault, an American system. We’re the only party that still relies on what is, in effect, an amateur product.
Now, we can continue to say, “Well, these chaps are Lib Dems, and they’ve been working ever so hard for all these years”, or we can actually utilise the free market to get what we want. The problem is that this sort of change has to take place at the national level. This sort of change was recognised in Bones, but has since fallen by the wayside thanks to strong protests by JayJay.
“Ah, but Hywel, there are many companies which have gone out and written an alternative.”
Fine – go use them :-). Or any of the other hundred varients there are. My point is that no-one stops anyone within the party using whatever package they want.
EARS was not developed because someone at national level made a decision to do so but because someone started writing a package which others found useful.
It isn’t just the program though – it’s setting up the infrastructure to supply and support all the different end users
Historically EARS was not even the campaign database package of choice if you go back to 1990-91.
You are of course correct that there’s no official database that the party uses. However, it’s also the case that the vast majority of the training the party provides – I’m thinking in particular of the sort of work Mark Pack does – is in EARS. EARS is the de facto national programme, regardless of its official status – Rennard has just given them funding for further development.
Now, we can either accept that we have an official non-official package and start funding it properly, or we can open the process out to tender. If we don’t, then we’ll be in a situation with EARS 9 where we’ll have a national online database that isn’t even officially endorsed by the party. This is ridiculously amateurish.
Hywel, you suggest the solution is to go and out use the variants created by other companies. The need to go out to tender is because we all recognise the benefits of having a single in system in use across all local parties, allowing data to be aggregated and analysed at different levels.
If we all went out independently and made individual purchaing decisions we would have similar problems to the ones we had in 1990.
The point is we need to make a decision as a whole party – and as it’s such an important decision it needs to be done in a robust and open way – and tendering would achieve that, as well as driving the quality up, and ensuring we have a properly supported system. EARS delivers on this in part at the moment – but we need a real improvement, and I’m not sure than can be delivered simply by commsiioning more work from EARS, without opening it up to competition
My view of EARS was jaundiced a couple of years ago when my PC was badly screwed up by the installation. Admittedly it was an older version of Windows, and the problem wouldn’t have been so serious if it hadn’t been for the fact that because of previous difficulties the machine wasn’t “seeing” the keyboard at the stage of startup when the botched installation caused error messages.
But the fact remains that the installation was botched, and for a couple of days – until I worked out how to get round the problem – I thought I was going to have to reformat my hard disc. The helpful response from EARS was along the lines of “couldn’t have been anything to do with us, gov”.
Considering that we often rely on people hosting committee rooms to let us borrow their PCs and install software on them, this kind of thing isn’t acceptable.
It’s just that whenever we have a discussion about EARS someone says how easy it would be to produce an alternative – and that is implied a bit by the comments above.
If we were to apply “taking power and using it in their communities” then people would be getting their own alternatives.
“If we all went out independently and made individual purchaing decisions we would have similar problems to the ones we had in 1990.”
Problems? Were there any? A significant proportion of target seats were using POLLY (the alternative to EARS in the early 90s) at least up till 1994. I think both the Euro seats we won in 1994 (and county’s won in 1993) operated both systems in different areas.
If you were to have a national campaign database system then you might need a common package across all constituencies (my knowledge of databases isn’t that extensive but I don’t think even that is essential if the central data format is open source.
“This sort of change was recognised in Bones, but has since fallen by the wayside thanks to strong protests by JayJay.”
The Bones Commission explicitly rejected the idea of “Scrapping EARS and replacing it with a whole new system” and recommended providing EARS/HANDS to each local party “free of charge”. Its longer term proposals are masterclasses in the “intrepret this how you want” school of recommendation writing :-). Certainly no-one could describe them as firm!
Hywel, I’m unsure what you’re actually in favour of, aside from inertia. You are right to say acquiring a new package is not easy – but then say it should be something done by local parties regardless.
Implementing a new database (or even making the current one properly funded and national) is very difficult, and not something that can really be tried at the local level. However, one of our activists who’s fluent in this sort of thing did actually have a go. He wanted to produce a version of EARS that we could set up on a virtual private network, giving relevant members of the local party access to our central database from their own homes. In trying to do so, he was stonewalled every step of the way by EARS. His requests for assistance and help met with obfuscation and outright denial. In the end, the project had to be terminated because it was clear we couldn’t do it with EARS (the company, not necessarily just the product) as it stood.
This isn’t good enough. Local initiatives are being quashed by an unofficially centralised model that has none of the benefits of centralisation and all of the drawbacks. An open-source database might work, but it’s not going to happen under EARS. We need change. The current approach is not as effective as it could be. I don’t think you’re necessarily against change, but you do seem more in favour of shooting down the other suggestions on offer here than discussing their relative merits.
“I don’t think you’re necessarily against change, but you do seem more in favour of shooting down the other suggestions on offer here than discussing their relative merits.”
I’m not – I’m just pointing out that there are no barriers the party has erected to stop people doing anything. You don’t really need EARS co-operation for that.
From a personal point of view EARS has (1) never let me down and (2) never stopped me doing something I wanted to do in a campaign (albeit after some inventive juggling on occasion)
I think the approach of some central resources to improve the model we already have is going to work out the least expensive and most effective way of improving things.
Many years ago I was a Polly user… then boundary changes meant I used both for a while, then I switched fully to EARS. I have, generally, been a very satisfied customer for about 20 years. Yes, EARS needs a great deal of development. Yes, EARS 9 is a long time coming. But these are both because it has operated on a shoestring.
Yes, Chris Rennard has just given them funding for development. But I think this is the first time they have ever had any direct funding, so it is part of a solution to the problems.
Better get back to the Riso, Monkey. I can’t hear it printing.
EARS 9 launching at this September’s conference in Birmingham! Yes it is! Internet E.A.R.S. for all.
Of course, only after they lost the national tender to the cheaper, American, V.A.N.s… Ah well.