WRITTEN ON Monday, August 31st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, Political engagement, What do we want?

Blythe writes to point out a new Scottish government consultation on identity and privacy. Though there’s a limit to Scotland’s freedom of action on these issues, that seems somehow to act as a spur to them working harder to understand these issues in a contempory manner. So well worth responding to I’d have thought.

WRITTEN ON Monday, August 24th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Save Time and Money, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

See Public Strategist’s writeup. Wish I:
- could have been there
- was good at all that coding and stuff
- still qualified as “young” (though I’d settle for “forever young”)
Can there ever have been more of a breath of fresh air in government IT? This is verging on Ideal!

WRITTEN ON Friday, August 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Save Time and Money, We told you so..., What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

WRITTEN ON Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

John Suffolk has a post on PCs and security – quite fun. And I managed to comment on it without any trouble this time, which is a relief:
Plain fact is people have powerful PCs and Macs and phones and access to the Internet and do loads of stuff with it. So I’d question your language [...]

WRITTEN ON Thursday, August 13th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, Save Time and Money, We told you so..., What do we want?

Wowser. Kable’s Philippe Martin (who developed the original ID costing model on which all sensible industry estimates and also the LSE’s estimates were based) reckons cancelling the Benighted ID Scheme will still save £3.1bn.
A detailed analysis of the National Identity Scheme’s costs for UK citizens by Kable suggests that the £4.95bn cost over 10 years [...]

WRITTEN ON Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Transformational Government

John Suffolk’s blog isn’t taking comments from me for some reason (nothing personal I’m sure). So I’ll put my latest on his latest here instead:
John – delighted to see you pick this up Jerry’s gauntlet with a thorough and reasoned post.
You say “This seems hugely simplistic” …but there is a straightforward choice to be [...]

WRITTEN ON Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, We told you so..., What do we want?

I reckon Drummond Reed over in the US is showing us the way to go in the new Open ID/ICF white paper(Info Card Foundation press release) :
Entitled Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government, the paper explains the approach both foundations are taking to enable open, Internet-scale trust networks using OpenID and Information Cards.
“Open trust frameworks [...]

WRITTEN ON Saturday, August 8th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Oh blimey (Guardian)
Chief constables across England and Wales have been told to ignore a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights and carry on adding the DNA profiles of tens of thousands of innocent people to a national DNA database. Senior police officers have also been “strongly advised” that it is “vitally [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, August 7th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Pertinent Art, What do we want?

In describing the NSA’s ambitious construction of a $1.5bn 1m sq ft data centre, James Bamford invokes Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel”:
..a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood. In this “labyrinth of letters,” [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, August 7th, 2009 BY David Moss AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Swiss official warns approval of new US tax treaty unlikely absent UBS deal
Switzerland’s Parliament is not expected to approve a tax treaty with the US, which incorporates OECD standards of tax information exchange, unless the US litigation against the Swiss bank, UBS, is resolved.
The Swiss Government hopes that an extra-judicial settlement will be found.
On 8 [...]