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 Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Identity, Uncategorized

At the invitation of IPS and Intellect I gave a Ctrl-Shift talk about the role of the individual in future public services. It’s material that will be familiar to the IdealGov posse, but I was apprehensive because this is a close-knit community very focussed on large contracts and not known for welcoming alternate views.
We [...]

WRITTEN ON Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 BY ruthkennedy AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?

Paul Clarke writes thoughtfully here about the confusion/agitation/frustration surrounding arrest of an architectural photographer for taking pictures of Merrill Lynch building in London this morning (in the light of recent clarification by ACPO that anti terror laws should not be used to stop photographers in public places). Comments refer to the fuzziness between private security firms [...]

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 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 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 Friday, September 25th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, We told you so..., What do we want?

This powerful No2ID ad – much more striking, foreful and truthful than the stupid Home Office smiley-fingerprints ads launched today – was the subject, it seems, of complaint to the Advertising Standards Association by one single reader of the New Statesman.

pdf here
The complaints were:
that the ad: 1. misleadingly exaggerated the information that would be [...]

WRITTEN ON Thursday, September 24th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, We told you so..., What do we want?

Wired has a nice graphic for the FBI’s God-quest. It shows several of the businesses which handed over customer records to the state: