Politics is about collective decision making. It’s hard not just because people disagree about the answers to particular questions, but even more so because they disagree about how those questions relate to one another. The answer you get depends on the question you ask, and politics is about trying to find agreement on the questions [...]
Policy development is rarely simple even, or perhaps especially, when the question looks ludicrously simple. There is a door between the lifts and the working areas of the building I work in.* The door sits at the intersection of three policies, and as a result, cannot satisfy all of them. Of the three, the one [...]
Responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response. Archon [...]
4IP announced a new investment last week: Everybody has economic transactions with the government, whether outgoing in the form of tax, or incoming in the form of benefits, loans or grants, and in these times of fiscal austerity the project has widespread relevance by making the huge numbers we hear on the news mean something [...]
Just after posting earlier this morning on data and design, I came across a post from a couple of days ago by Dan McQuillanmaking a very closely related point. His focus is on the point that opening data does not in itself create empowered communities – and by implication, may well relatively disempower those groups [...]
In the heat of battle, sometimes it can be hard to tell that you have won. The battle for government data has been hard fought and bloody. For a long time the outcome was unclear. The battle ebbed and flowed, with clouds of smoke and seas of churned up mud making it hard to see [...]
Yesterday was filled with the sound of silence. That is, of course, complete hyperbole. Web traffic continued, blogs were updated, tweets were twittered, and it’s even possible that out in the real world people chatted in pubs. But in this small corner of the world, the loudest noise was a host of voices declaring silence. [...]
The actual success of Patient Opinion and the promising early signs shown by MyPolice prompt an obvious question for those of us involved with public services which are neither health nor police: can we have one too? In both those areas, it is pretty clear that focusing on the concept of a complaint being at [...]
Government is a big and unwieldy beast. Even when it is looking where it is going, it is all to easy for it to step on small creatures and hardly notice the crunch. All too often, it isn’t particularly looking where it is going and can tread on things without malice or intent - but [...]
A digital citizenry isn’t interested in talking to an analogue government David Eaves (h/t Martin Stewart Weeks)