The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
Posts under ‘Public administration’
Less cynicism? Or less scepticism?
The Birmingham News Room – a well-executed information hub managed by Birmingham City Council has been launched and there’s a good write-up from Nick Booth over at Podnosh. I don’t have much to add to his account of it, and I’d urge to to have a good look around and think about the idea., but [...]
Never place 100% of the blame for failure upon the shoulders of someone with a veto.
Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago: Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those [...]
A think tank of your own
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point: Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers [...]
A new deputy in town
At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office. I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take [...]
Getting the politics right for reform
Matthew Taylor, former No 10 policy wonk, has an interesting article on his blog about public service reform. He rightly says that finances over the next few years are both a huge challenge to public services, but also an opportunity to make real change happen. That won’t come about, he says, without a change in [...]
No longer a pipe dream
Here’s Will Davies on how what used to pass for blue skies thinking is now just down and dirty: “When David Cameron declared the need for a new constitutional settlement recently, quite a bit of this was based on the capabilities of new technologies such as youtube and text messaging. Leaving aside the overall quality [...]
Empower failure
According to the Municipal Journal, the UK Government has abandoned plans to introduce a Community Empowerment Bill, which would have implemented some parts of the Communities in Control White Paper. According to the Commons authorities, the Bill would have enabled remote voting in Council meetings, reduced the barriers to introducing an elected mayor, change the [...]
Eating the Elephant
Shorter version: Often, the minor technical obstacles mask a wider small-p political obstructionism to the promotion of a more interactive form of government. Having written this post about the small obstacles to open e-gov a few weeks ago, Tim Davies got such a comprehensive response in his comments thread that he’s rolled them out into [...]
Steady state on citizenship stats
The England Citizenship Survey for April – December 2008 was published the other day by CLG (pdf, Excel data). Overall, despite the onset of the financial crisis, attitudes to and participation in politics don’t seem to have changed much. A few headlines: Only one fifth of people (22%) feel that they can influence decisions taken [...]
