WRITTEN ON Sunday, November 29th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Funny what happens when you set up a competition to write a better IT strategy. I’ve had three comments offering me drugs I’ve never heard of, plus one offering zoo sex. The new Wordpress deals quickly and efficiently with spam, but I’d better tune up those filters.
Then I hear that ther may be a [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, November 27th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement, Save Time and Money, Transformational Government, What do we want?

@NTOUK and @williamheath are heartily fed up with half-baked government IT strategies.
Having to read the current proposal is the last straw. Modernising Govt promised the same in 1999. The 2009 draft Government ICT Strategy – New world, new challenges, new opportunities seems oddly detached from the pressing discussions under way about public services renewal. It [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, November 27th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Government Procurement, Save Time and Money, Uncategorized

The storm clouds that lashed the fat-cat bankers and expense-extracting MPs may now be shifting over to government IT suppliers with excessive profit margins and senior government IT staff with over-generous pay packages. The Daily Mail had a pop at Mike Mackay of the Youth Justice Board in August (and fair enough, I’d have thought, [...]

WRITTEN ON Thursday, November 26th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Pertinent Art

Loved every minute I attended of the mypublicservices09 event. After Malmo09 that’s two DIY public-services events in two weeks. They feel natural, creative, fun and important.
It struck me that this time the powerful voices of the enegetic idealists were joined by a good number of public servants. Together we spoke of the same things in [...]

WRITTEN ON Thursday, November 26th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Pertinent Art

The excellent emerging tradition (in the tradition of Eclectech) of pertinent art as constructive critique of ill-advised emerging policies continues:

(Tweeted by JP)

WRITTEN ON Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Government Procurement, Political engagement, Power of Information

Interesting post on transparency in government by Liam Maxwell on the Conservative local government blog:
…Once you have gone through the obvious and straightforward, many of the sustainable cost savings we need to generate come through changing peoples’ behaviour: to become more cost effective, to continually recognise and eliminate even small amounts of waste.
That requires personal [...]

WRITTEN ON Saturday, November 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Political engagement, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

David Osimo and Paul Johnston brought the voice of the public into the last day of the official Malmo eGov2009 proceedings. Here’s their video of different people reading their crowd-sourced open declaration:

Must have been a good coup de theatre – Ton says it raised a round of applause.
Paul recorded me doing one section [...]

WRITTEN ON Saturday, November 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Pertinent Art

The winner of the Pertinent Art competition at the 1st popular European unConference was Open Rights Group’s Statebook.

Runners up included the Woberator from Holland, which breaks Ministries’ resistance to FoI requests by spamming them, and Evasori.info, the Italian mashup which maps tax evaders.

WRITTEN ON Saturday, November 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project

The prize for spotting redesigned Idealgov as it meandered through the global DNS system is a CD of 21gov.net’s new State of the eUnion book. Winners are Public Strategist (whose comments on the Ministerial declaration are well worth a read) and our own long-time contributor David Moss. To be handed over when we meet for [...]

WRITTEN ON Saturday, November 21st, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Pertinent Art, Political engagement

In another first for the Malmo09 First popular unConference on eGovernment, Britain’s most senior official responsible for ICTs addresses the people of Europe via video Twitter.

In his quest for a lingua franca he flirts with his fluent Farsi but, in an unexpected and courageous move, chooses to express himself in contempory Swedish. Exemplying the [...]