WRITTEN ON Sunday, January 10th, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Ideal government IT strategy

No public service has ever been formally designed, from intention to execution. Every single one of them should have been.
That was the nub of an Aha-Erlebnis conversation with the late and much-lamented Charles Cox (who at that time was MD of EDS, responsible for delivering more on-line Whitehall services than everyone else put together). [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, January 8th, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement

The new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has a consultation up on MPs expenses. Do it, people! If we don’t fill it out now and feed back, we can hardly complain if we don’t like how MPs’ expenses work in future.
It’s a deceptively simple looking web site which is easy to use but pretty thorough [...]

WRITTEN ON Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

Cripes. HM’s Loyal Opposition has announced – if elected – a £1m prize for an online platform for large-scale crowdsourcing.
This almost comes onto the radar of big IT suppliers. It’s massive for smart little NGOs; it would have funded about a decade of early MySociety work.
I got it in an email (extract below). [...]

WRITTEN ON Friday, December 18th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Government Procurement, Ideal Goverment - project, Ideal government IT strategy, Identity, Pertinent Art, Policies, Political engagement, Power of Information, Save Time and Money, Transformational Government, We told you so...

It’s time to say what we want from government IT.
Let’s do this together. Let’s say “wouldn’t it be better if” about how tech affects transparency, costs and the quality of public services and how they affect our lives.
@ntouk and I have long since been fed up with what one senior Whitehall official yesterday called [...]

WRITTEN ON Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Bad stuff, Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement

Murdoch’s tabloid columnist David Aaranovitch has stepped up as first cheerleader in Michael Wills’ long-promised riposte to our highly successful and influential Database State report earlier this year for JRRT. He’s no doubt well paid to use forceful language, and strike provocative poses. But he doesn’t get it.
What the hell has Facebook, the greatest of [...]

WRITTEN ON Monday, December 7th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Ideal Goverment - project, Transformational Government, What do we want?

At first glance the new Smarter Government white paper looks pretty refreshing.
The stuff on freeing up data is good:
‘Public data’ are ‘government-held non-personal data that are collected or generated in the course of public service delivery’.
Our public data principles state that:
* Public data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form
[...]

WRITTEN ON Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Save Time and Money

Consumer Focus is calling for a rethink of DirectGov which puts the consumer at the centre:
Directgov appears to have grown into the massive service it is today without a clear consumer-focused strategy. As described, the 2005 Cabinet Office report, Transformational Government: enabled by technology, set out a vision for transforming services through digital means, [...]

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 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 Thursday, November 19th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Pertinent Art, Political engagement

With Ministerial and industry declarations echoing in the conference centre across town Donagh and I are in Garaget in uptown Malmo, preparing for the first popular European e-government conference. We’ve got plenty of “starting point” material and pertinent art. If and when people come tonight we’ll work out a running order together for the unConference [...]