Headshift looks approvingly at the growing world of social taxonomy generation. It’s definitely an interesting idea to help with the taxonomy vs chaos approach to creating information structures. However, without a good general search engine, surely the benefit is lost as substantial chunks of pages might fall through the gap. What about a peer-reviewed folksonomy?
Archive for August, 2004
Stiki Wiki is proper in-page Wiki editing. Very nice indeed. When do we get to use it?
Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet looks at growing communities of practice. This is an interesting approach to the KM requirements in consulting. I should look at adding this to BuyIT BPG and probably to consulting as well.
Headshift pick up the growing meme that suggests that e-gov is a bad thing.
Some memes we need to battle:
£7.4bn - this number comes up all of the time, and contains a huge pile of assumptions, double counting and other errors. I don’t think there’s a meaningful number for what the “e-government programme” is costing (other than it’s probably higher than that one if you include people and process change and probably lower if you look solely at payments to vendors).
“Government doesn’t know what users want” - Untrue. The Directgov initiative (which is joined up with the e-gov initiatives discussed in the article) has done enormous amounts of user testing, focus grouping and research. But that doesn’t suit the tone of the article.
So lets leave the value aside, and concentrate on what’s being done. In the local e-government programme (which I’ve been lucky enough to work on for the last couple of years), the government has done a range of things: putting services online, stimulating public sector partnerships and collaboration (think Victoria Climbie), reducing the postcode lottery in local service provision, helping to join up local and central government. That’s just for starters, and the total budget for this chunk was £675m over five years. Suddenly it doesn’t look so large for what it has achieved across 388 councils in the UK (How would you feel if it read that the spend was £10 per person over five years or £1.7m per council over five years?).
In all these pieces it is safe to say that e-gov has been used as a transformation engine, not as the end itself. As is commonly quoted: if you put a crap service online, you just allow citizens to discover more rapidly that it’s a crap service. The point is this: the focus that e-gov and online service delivery forces on councils and departments is a useful one: it helps them deliver better service more efficiently. If the programmes finish and have delivered all government services online and only that, then they’ll have failed.
Next planning cycle the push will be for regional government and Gershon efficiencies, not e-gov, and they’ll probably cost the same amount or more to implement.
An addendum: Simon Caulkin (the author of the Observer article) quotes a Kable report as authoritative on this issue. Mr Caulkin wrote the report he quotes, yet doesn’t disclose this in the text of the article. Not my favourite form of journalism.
Another addendum: I don’t like the e-citizen enforced registration either. A public blog is a good idea. However, the problem of comment spam on high-profile blogs is a substantial one and may make this route difficult. Public forums, etc make sense as an alternative.
Whahay! Chris got nominated for the Perrier!
Letter in the Independent from R S Clymo of East Sussex, in full:
Sir:
now that the coxless fours has ended satisfactorily, may we hope that
you will arrange for a photograph of “The Four Oarsmen on the
Acropolis"?
Sygate Personal Firewall looks like a good option for a free firewall product.
Fold Till You Drop showcases some simply astonishing origami.
More proof that the “copyright” industries are systematically misleading the press on the true impact of downloading movies and music.
Jason Kitcat (great name) nails the main reasons for Newham’s decision to stick with MS over OSS. It was purely used as a negotiating tool. And nice one Newham. I hear that they got a 10-fold reduction in prices in some cases. Thanks to the GCat system in operation in the UK, this means that MS probably has to pass on similar discounts throughout the public sector. Nice one.
Headshift gives us a nice roundup of thinking about groups who can provide better decision-making than “experts”. As Lee say: the meat will come out of applying this to business and/or government?
Six great myths of IT. Well worth a read: don’t buy upgradeable servers, do have tech-savvy people at the top and you will succeed with IT, eventually.
Chris Addison (my brother-in-law) is the BBC’s top tip for the Perrier. Kiss of death, maybe?
As you might expect, language and its usage can affect thought and activities.
Glad to see some sense in the US legal system. Apparently file sharing networks should not be held liable for the potentially illegal actions of their member.
Nice article from Charles Arthur on what celebrity magazines should really be called. "Stalk", "Obsess", etc.
An interesting examination of how you might wind up (and wind down) a jury and why the McDonalds coffee burns damages case was an abberation in McCoffee burns. Very lawyer-focused, but interesting nonetheless.
A case study to tell you not to use “in perpetuity” in a contract.
Firstly a European repository of best practice and a report that the UK is fifth for e-government.
Even in the silly season, people are picking up on the e-gov is bad story from the Observer. My next (and new) job? To help provide the evidence that says that e-gov is good.
