Apr 18

The Geek Layer

And Gov said “Let there be data” and there was data and he looked and he saw that it was open. In the past I’ve had my doubts and my rants about the claims made for open data and its potential for bringing transparency to political process. I think my frustrations came from the idea [...]

Nov 27

Who are the Neteratti?

One of the things that people tend to ignore is that government organisations are not designed to be transformational. They are designed to be process oriented, reliable, auditable and while they serve all of us they are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable people in our society. With that as your key driver you don’t suddenly start transforming things just because a load of middle class Neteratti start shouting about it. The implication of this is that the core functions of local government will not change quickly or significantly over a short timescale. What will happen is that certain functions will move outside of government, and we see this happening already, and it will move into the realm of the Neteratti.

Sep 19

Hunting Elephants

Most people, I imagine will have read the piece called “Hunting elephants”. If not, do, you can find many versions by doing a web search on “Desktop Elephants”. I don’t even know who wrote the original so I can’t credit them properly; suffice it to say, despite its age it has real meaning today.  If [...]

Sep 4

Is There an Elephant in the Room?

I speculated that one of the greatest barriers to Gov 2.0 was institutional deafness. Nobody is listening. The result is Citizen Shock, if nobody is listening whay are we doing this? In fairness, there’s more to it than that, of course there is. Hindman’s “Myth of Digital Democracy” points to a very important one, citizen [...]

Aug 28

Citizen Shock

Two things have prompted me to commit these thoughts to print: the idea that Social Media is nothing more than an enabler for Gov 20 – a comment doing the rounds of #Gov20 last week – and the idea that people have disengaged from politics and need to be somehow re-connected.