Sir David Normington, top civil servant at the Home Office, has a blog of sorts on his department’s intranet. He’s not the only senior official to do this: it’s a natural extension of the ‘letter to staff’ you see in every internal newsletter.
But somebody put in an FOI request to see the contents… and the man/woman at the Home Office said yes. So here’s a first wad from last month, and a further wad published yesterday. I’m actually quite encouraged by it all: frank admissions of where the problems are, and freedom to express some personal opinion. Traits a good blog should have.
Of course, this was probably all done on the (always mistaken) assumption that it would remain within the Home Office. If this can be retrieved each month by someone lodging an FOI request, you almost wonder if it would be more efficient to publish it in the open. Indeed, couldn’t someone just lodge a regular request each month, then copy-and-paste it into a publicly visible blog him/herself? The genie just found a way out of the bottle.
Credit: BBC Open Secrets blog.
Response
Well spotted Simon! Though doubt that anyone involved in digital publishing in government doesn’t think that its public domain once its on a blog. We’ve got around 80,000 staff around the country, impossible to contain even if you tried.