Government

Taking two days out of the hectic build up to the full launch of GOV.UK, I spoke at Javazone 2012 in Oslo to share the GDS story so far. You can find a video of the talk on vimeo.

The second of the three GOV.UK beta releases was unveiled last week. " INSIDE GOVERNMENT" is the promised “corporate publishing platform” designed to bring together the core web publishing activity of all government departments in one place. Neil’s written very eloquently about it on the Government Digital Service blog, outlining some of their core challenges, and James Mead has added the developers’ perspective on the Free Range blog about their involvement in it. It’s a strange release for me—it was the first of GDS’ launches that I didn’t press the button for, or even attend as I’m currently out on paternity leave—but I’m really delighted to see it out there for the world to feed back on. Since I first heard about the vision for the single domain I’ve been excited about the possibility that government information could be published in a way that allows it to be sliced along axes other than ‘department’ and “INSIDE GOVERNMENT” begins to give some life to that. ...

Late last night I commented out the HTTP authentication settings, and Alpha.gov.uk was live. I’ve not slept much since then, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly. Apart from my email and twitter clients which are swimming in a deluge of feedback. There’s a quick post from me on the Alphagov blog exploring the way we’re handling geographic information and place names. A longer post is coming later in the week with an outline of the technical architecture of the site, and a few more will follow exploring more nitty gritty details. ...

According to leaked documents obtained by The Times, the UK government is planning a green (discussion/consultation) paper proposing strong action against “illegal file-sharing.” According to the leaked documents they want ISPs to take the primary responsibility for monitoring usage and to ban any of their users who continually share copyrighted materials without permission. Whatever your position on copyright enforcement in a digital age, this is a ludicrous idea. Logistically such proposals will be almost impossible to enforce effectively. Setting aside the issue that many of us encrypt as much as possible of the data going out from our computers, it will effectively require ISPs to monitor all traffic going through their networks in a far more intrusive way than they currently do. ...

For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level. ...

On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here. The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States. ...