From Robert Niles via Doc Searls: Readers owe you nothing. They have no responsibility as citizens to read your reporting, and no responsibility as consumers to look at your ads. They have the right, and ability, to go about their lives without ever once glancing at your publication. If you want people to read your [...]
Kable reports that: The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa) has become less effective in enforcing road traffic legislation, as a result of a government wide rule banning devices holding unencrypted personal data from leaving the office. … Transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick said in a written parliamentary answer to Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins on 2 [...]
Trust came up in two very different contexts today, but raising very similar issues. The first was a visit, for no particular reason, to Slow Leadership, having not been near it for months. Fairly randomly, I came across a post on why trusting people more is the simplest way to cut your workload and stress: [...]
Over a month ago, Kable published a cryptic piece on how disadvantaged people use public services. But there was no trace of the research on which it was apparently based. Now it has finally appeared on the National Consumer Council website. It was worth waiting for. It turns out to be a project called consumer [...]
The Oxford Internet Institute organised an intriguing sounding seminar under the title of Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government. The implied raspberry in the subtitle was itself a promise of some entertainment while the main title implied radical realignment of boring government with the hyper trendy of Web 2.0. The combination made it unmissable.
I heard a wonderfully succinct specification of the congestion charge yesterday: Every car which enters central London and does not pay £5 by midnight should be charged £40. I like it both for its brevity and (which probably says something about me) for the fact that what most of us see as its core characteristic [...]
Time. perhaps, to find something positive to say about HMRC and their approach to customers and their data. Income tax is a system within which people accrue liabilities to pay money to government, which they meet either by not seeing the money in the first place because tax is deducted at source or by paying [...]
“Think big” is easy.
“Start small” is also easy.
“Scale quickly” is very hard.
If an employer wants to employ a foreign worker – one from outside the EEA – they need a work permit. And the ever-helpful Home Office is on hand to ease their way through the process. In most cases it is the employer, not the prospective employee who has to make the application – which [...]
Michael Cross of the Guardian sees some signs that e-government might be "entering bureaucracy’s DNA". Leaving aside the oddity of the metaphor, this is clearly intended to be a positive comment – Cross is observing a move away from simply replicating offline experiences online and towards changing – or abolishing – the underlying process. So [...]