Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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  • Illegal state aid for Microsoft?

    Some interesting exchanges in Westminster Hall on Tuesday, with Southport’s LibDem MP John Pugh raising the subject of open-source software – and in particular, government’s relationship with Microsoft. Er, hang on a moment…

    Fundamentally this debate is about neither Microsoft nor open source; it is about eradicating the suspicion and certainly the prospect—indeed, I believe it is the reality—of illegal state aid being given to any software enterprise through the use of public resources.

    Oops, sorry, my mistake. Now, what’s this about ‘illegal state aid’?

    If someone cannot access benefits online without using a (Microsoft) Windows-based computer, as is currently the case, I do not see how the Government can be doing anything other than involving themselves in illegal state aid. They simply do not need to do that as it would be technically possible to access the system some other way.

    Um, yeah, I think I see your point.

    Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury Angela Eagle gave a familiar argument in response: open source is used in certain places, and it’s a level playing field. ‘We will procure the solution that can offer the best value for money and that can best meet our requirements: high quality, reliability, security and more specific criteria in each case as the contracts are designed. If that solution is open source, we will use open source.’

    I’m doing my bit of course, with a (growing!) list of mini-projects from various government sources, which will (in all likelihood) come back to WordPress. Never mind the cost argument: I’m increasingly of the opinion that open source offers a better long-term bet, in terms of quality of product, available skills base, and lack of lock-in.

  • Labour 'utterly resistant' to grassroots empowerment?

    It’s coming up to a year since Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former chief adviser on political strategy, became chief executive of the RSA. As you may know, his mission is to turn the organisation into ‘a network for civic innovation’. Supporting him in this initiative is a group of similarly-minded individuals, calling themselves OpenRSA, who recently held their first ‘real world’ meeting.

    I was struck by one particular passage in David Wilcox’s video recording of Matthew’s remarks to the group:

    Part of the reason I was enthused by this idea is that I tried to do it at the Labour Party for ten years – and it was totally impossible. I spent ten years saying ‘can’t we turn our members into civic entrepreneurs? can’t we actually look like we believe in progressive change on the ground, rather than just knocking on people’s doors?’ The party leadership and party stakeholders were utterly resistant to this idea.

    Granted, he wasn’t talking about web strategy exactly, but in these 2.0 days, I’m not sure there’s still a clear distinction between technology and grassroots empowerment.

    Meanwhile, Labour gets a kicking (hardly the first!) from UK tech blog TechDigest, who declare it ‘very sad that our current Prime Minister and his Party have made the least amount of effort online. With that election coming ’round one day they better step up a gear or six.’

    It’s common knowledge – and I know from conversations I had myself – that the party was on full ‘get ready’ mode, in case Mr Brown said ‘yes’. It can’t possibly have escaped their notice that the Tories, and arguably also the LibDems, were much stronger in the ‘online community’ game. They couldn’t have done much to turn it all round in three weeks; but 18 months ought to be plenty of time.

  • Slow down, Darling

    If you’re interested, I’ve posted my take on the Pre-Budget Report over at the BT Business blog – with (I think) appropriate political balance, given that it’s under a BT banner. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more comment generally about the pace of Darling’s delivery. The speech seemed to fly by, certainly in comparison to previous years. And was I the only one surprised to see how many Labour front-benchers failed to get a seat on the front bench? Browne, Miliband (E) and Benn were caught in cutaway shots, standing on the fringes.

  • Charlie Brooker on target

    I quite enjoyed Charlie Brooker’s assault on TV news on this week’s edition of BBC FOUR’s Screenwipe. A surprising amount of fond nostalgia, including a few laugh-out-loud moments I hadn’t seen before (and one or two we’ve seen too often). His specific criticisms – how TV whipped up the hysteria over Northern Rock, the lack of actual news in the Madeleine McCann case – were spot on, but if I’m honest, a bit predictable for anyone at all familiar with the industry. Still worth half an hour of your time though: if you missed it, try to catch one of the repeats on Friday and Saturday, or take a punt on the iPlayer.

    (Speaking of which… I wonder how many people are actually using iPlayer? I’ve downloaded a grand total of one single show since the trial launched nearly three months ago. And that was only cos my TV was dead due to flood damage.)

  • Sky's new Budget game

    Cutting it rather fine ahead of this afternoon’s financial statements, Sky News has posted a Flash-based ‘if I were Prime Minister‘ game, where you can move the public finances around, and see what Adam Boulton makes of your decisions. The game itself is a bit simplistic – just a bunch of sliders, really. But it’s a nice touch to see Mr Boulton doing a video piece-to-camera, outside No10, to give you your outcome. Now… what would be really clever would be if it built an aggregated ‘people’s CSR’ behind the scenes, to show us precisely where the public’s priorities lay?!

  • The New Politics

    I’m sure if you read this, you probably also read David Wilcox’s blog. In case you don’t… he’s just written a very well-considered piece on ‘the new politics’, in the wake of the weekend’s on-off election shenanigans. Read it – particularly the five points of conclusion at the end.

    David might also have mentioned that David Cameron expressed very similar sentiments in his conference speech: half a dozen times he used the words ‘the old politics is failing’, before pledging:

    ‘Let us resolve right here, that we will not pursue the old politics. No more Downing Street summits, get together a packet of measures for the 6 o’clock News, brief them out and then while everyone has reported them they never actually happen and everyone moves onto the next thing. That is not what this Party is going to do.’

    Sounds remarkably like a cross-party consensus for democratic engagement? Ha ha ha.

    David’s point about ‘creating trusted places within which more constructive discussion can take place’ is an interesting one. I spent a bit of time last week (for obvious reasons) thinking about how you could aggregate leading political blogs into a single easy-to-browse site… and it should be remarkably easy. It would be a start.

  • Free wifi at McDonald's

    Didn’t see much mention of this last week… McDonald’s have announced plans to offer free wifi in 1,200 UK outlets by the end of the year. No sign of anything on McDonald’s or The Cloud’s sites. Very good news; I’m only just getting used to wifi working, and I’ve had trouble finding free hotspots in and around central London. The ICA is a cool place to hang out… but they don’t open until noon. Any other recommendations, anyone?

  • I want my TV On Demand

    My (only just) 2-year-old daughter is currently complaining to Mummy that she wants to watch Dora The Explorer, but it isn’t on anywhere just now. You know what? She’s right. Why shouldn’t we expect to get the programme we want, when we want? Instead she’s having to put up with Fifi And The Flowertots, which I personally can’t stand. Possibly due to Jane Horrocks providing the nicey-nicey voiceover. Still haven’t forgiven her for that Mrs-Supermarket-Manager-Becomes-PM thing.

  • My two to-do lists

    My work contacts fall, more or less, into three camps: public sector, media and large corporate. And at the moment, two of those are in something of a frenzy.

    The media contacts are desperately throwing together election plans, where they had expected to have at least six months to work them up. Indeed, to some extent, there’s an air of resignation that if the election is called, there just won’t be time to make the best ideas happen.

    The public sector contacts seem either desperate to kick jobs off, perhaps before ‘purdah’ kicks in; or they’re getting understandably hesitant, on the possibility there may be a change of government, and their grand initiative doesn’t happen at all.

    I’m currently running two separate ‘to do’ lists: one for ‘if he does’, one for ‘if he doesn’t’. So I’m very keen to hear an announcement, one way or the other. But here’s the problem – if we aren’t to have a November election, there isn’t a proper ‘no’ announcement. It’s only a ‘not yet’. Life just rolls on. And all the time, in the backs of our minds, we’re all left wondering if it’ll now be a spring election instead. The uncertainty scales back, but doesn’t disappear.

    Depoliticising the electoral cycle suddenly seems like a good idea. In fact, if Gordon is looking to define ‘Brownism’, maybe depoliticisation is it.

  • Dammit, Prime Minister…

    I love the fact that Lord Darzi begins his interim report on the NHS with words which will immediately raise a smile among generations of Star Trek (all flavours) viewers: ‘I’m a doctor, not a politician…’ 🙂

    And lest it’s missed… one of Darzi’s recommendations is ‘that the NHS could benefit from greater distance from the day to day thrust of the political process.’ With that in mind, he has instructed NHS chief executive to look into an NHS Constitution. Taking the NHS out of politics – or indeed, taking politics out of the NHS? A huge step… but they did it, and quite successfully too (as all have now admitted), with the Bank of England.