Saturday was UK Government Barcamp day. A day of fast moving fun, filled with energetic and enthusiastic people who thought that giving up their weekend in the cause of better government was a sensible and desirable thing to do. There was a huge amount of energy on the day, represented and amplified in the twitter [...]
Two conversations, with smart people talking about difficult and interesting things. The day before yesterday, we were in a pub. It was crowded and noisy, and barely possible to hear from one end of the group to the other. But the discussion was lively and sustained, ideas were shared, thoughts developed. Last night, a more [...]
In the opening days of 2010, I am reading a collection of essays proclaiming itself to be The Best Technology Writing 2009, every single one of which was written and published in 2008. It’s a curious book, for several reasons. The first and most obvious is how very strange it now seems to be reading [...]
Yesterday’s my Public Services conference, organised by the redoubtable Patient Opinion, started with an arresting analogy from James Munro. It is well known that the iron bridge of Ironbridge was the first of its kind in the world. It was less well known (at least to me), that it was assembled as if the pieces [...]
Yesterday in Malmo, the e-government ministers of the EU had a meeting and, as is their wont, issued a declaration. As I have made clear before, I am not a fan of the term ‘e-government’, which I think tends to distract rather than illuminate, and nor am I a member of the esoteric group of [...]
As long as your personal information is secret, you don’t even have a privacy problem. It’s only when somebody else knows your personal information that you have a privacy problem Privacy is the problem you have after you share sensitive information. When you discover that you might have a socially awkward medical condition and you [...]
There are two things I understand about cloud computing. The first is that it works as an insurance policy. My house might burn down, my computers all get stolen, my hard disks fail simultaneously, and still I will not have lost any of the data I care most about because quietly every night Jungle Disk [...]
As expected, there is now a video of Howard Rheingold’s Reboot Britain presentation – scroll down the thumbnails on the right, his is the last one (though there is lots of good stuff along the way worth being diverted by). I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but have seen enough to confirm my suspicion [...]
If the past is a foreign country, how much more so the future. There have been endless articles – to say nothing of entire books – about the digital generation, but few of them in my experience really bring the differences to life. I was struck by a piece danah boyd has just written which [...]
Months can go by without encountering a single guru, then before you know it, three come along in a single week (actually there were more, but they were so thick on the ground that some I merely brushed past on staircases, rather than hearing them speak). Second of the three was Howard Rheingold, famous as [...]