Puffbox

A blink-and-you'll-miss-it line from the Sunday Times at the weekend: 'Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister wrongly accused of involvement in the Damian McBride smear e-mails, will return to the back benches. He has told friends he is exhausted by government and wants to see more of his two children.' I've got no inside track [...] read on »

Who said there were no 'senior strategic web roles' in government? The Cabinet Office has just issued a job advert, looking for someone to 'develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government', and 'act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement'. It's a Senior Civil Service Pay [...] read on »

Please, please, can we not have reshuffles on a Friday? The Cabinet positions were all confirmed by the end of the day... but the junior moves were certainly happening late into Friday evening, and one assumes, over the weekend. And whilst I'm sure a few government webbies were grateful for the weekend overtime, it does [...] read on »

I'm probably the last to pick up on this news, but for the sake of completeness, I should note the announcement last week of Tom Loosemore's imminent move from Ofcom to Channel 4's 4IP. With the demise of the notion of a Public Service Publisher online, quoted by Tom as 'one of [his] areas of focus' [...] read on »

I've just come across an Early Day Motion at the House of Commons, dated 1 July 2008, by Labour's Khalid Mahmood: That this House believes that the Register of Postcodes is a national public asset and should be freely available. Short and sweet. And attracting healthy numbers of (mostly Labour) MPs willing to add their names in [...] read on »

The latest move from Tom Watson's Power Of Information Taskforce, effectively a big BBC Backstage-style government mashup competition, is a master stroke. The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful. ... We will take the best ideas [...] read on »

One senses there's not a lot of love between Guido Fawkes and Tom Watson. So it's all the more remarkable that, within a few days, they've effectively reached an identical conclusion on the need for a better approach to public sector job advertising. A week ago, Tom wrote a blog post noting the lack of a [...] read on »

Tom Watson publishes (what looks like) a speech announcing the formation of a Power Of Information Taskforce, to be chaired by former LibDem MP Richard Allan (now senior manager of UK&I government affairs at Cisco), taking forward the Power Of Information report by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. An interim Progress Report on Power was published [...] read on »

I guess you might see it as kneejerk; I prefer to see it as responsive. The Civil Serf affair has brought the matter of civil servants blogging to a head, and now is absolutely the right time to work out the ground rules. At lunchtime, Tom Watson publishes a 'for starters' list of bullet points on [...] read on »

Full credit to Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson for his extremely measured and well-balanced take on the Civil Serf story. Tom was speaking at Tower 08, a major CO-hosted conference on Transformational Government - and has posted his speech on his long-established (and often highly party-political) blog. For the record, the speech isn't yet showing [...] read on »