What the government doesn't understand about the Internet, and what to do about it
2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they'd be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs' expenses, festering for years)?What The Government Doesn't Understand About the Internet, and What To Do About It (via O'Reilly Radar)3. Get a new cohort of civil servants who understand both the Internet and public policy, and end the era of signing huge technology contracts when the negotiators on the government's side have no idea how they systems they are paying for actually work. Coming up with new uses of technology, or perceiving how the Internet might be involved with undermining something in the future is an essential part of a responsible policy expert's skill-set these days, no matter what policy area they work in. It should be considered just as impossible for a new fast-stream applicant without a reasonably sophisticated view of how the Internet works to get a job as if they were illiterate ( a view more sophisticated than generated simply by using Facebook a lot, a view that is developed through tuition ). Unfashionably, this change almost certainly has to be driven from the center.
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Great article. Please do not restrict it to UK/USA. Every government worldwide could improve their grasp of the internet.
Greetings, LX
> end the era of signing huge technology contracts
> when the negotiators on the government's side
> have no idea how they systems they are paying for > actually work
End the era of PRINCE2 and make these projects much more open (including tendering ongoing finances). Adopt Agile (it's not a silver bullet but it helps) with *public* demos of working software at the end of development sprints.
The one thing I would really love to see though would be the government taking one small IT project and opening it up as a full open-source project. Sell the idea of having a government project on your CV to university students and see what they come up with (still with standards for documentation, testing, etc obviously).
We have to be careful not to leave anybody with our growing use of the Internet. There are still large segments of society that don't have regular Internet access due to lack of educational resources, financial resources, or even lack of a fixed address. Computer have-nots shouldn't become the new underclass.
I shudder to even think about the information technology competence of the european politicos - especially Germany has some real nasties up its sleeve. One of these even LOOKS like Magda Goebbels! You're far better of in the US.
It seems like the Obama Admin might actually have a bit of a clue when it comes to the intertubes.
http://gizmodo.com/5281357/obama-administration-adds-renowned-hacker-to-homeland-security-advisory-council
With regards to the new underclass comment, it is still the same old underclass. There is just a new attribute to being poor.
Your linking to this is serendipitous for me, Cory. I'm at work on my thesis introduction, which explains the political importance of access to information. More and more, I find myself looking at BB for handy quotations and examples of my point. Thank you!
I'm going to go out on a limb, and suggest that most people in the governments of the world have about as much understanding of the internet, as I do of the finer points of parlimentary procedure.
The Canadian government is actually not too bad in knowing how to *USE* the internet, they just fail at administering it. They let a few big players rule the tubes, which sucks of course.
Even my provincial and local governments have decent web services.