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 [...]
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Clay Shirky, quoted by Kevin Kelly, suggested by Martin Stewart-Weeks It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! Upton Sinclair
Last week I illustrated my post about the mergers and demergers of Whitehall with a very bad picture of a very neat illustration of the timelines of government departments in tube map style. Steph Gray responded to my plea for help in finding a cleaner version of the picture and linked me up with its [...]
The UK structure of government has the aura of great longevity. Prime Ministers have succeeded one another, the great offices of state have the outward form they had the century before last. There is no truck with a fifth republic – or a fifth anything else – here. But behind that facade of stately permanence, [...]
Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. Clay Shirky
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 [...]
I totally respect the need for caution and propriety, after all I was a civil servant, but you can’t on the one hand champion social media in government and on the other seek to manage and control the agenda. It just cannot work, and it won’t. Jeremy Gould commenting on a post by Dominic Campbell