Our thinking goes along these lines: if privacy is the means by which we ‘regulate access to our selves'(Westin, I think?) then it is essential for the creation of the personal boundaries that define us as individuals.

What are the possible effects upon children who grow up without control over their personal information? Will we reach a point where people no longer have a strongly-defined sense of self? What would society then be like?

In addition, if children don’t have a sense of personal boundary, that also has implications for their ability to protect themselves from unwanted intrusion. It doesn’t appear to make sense to tell them they can “say no”, which implies having an idea of themselves as ‘separate’, while treating them in ways that militate against that separation.

It would be fascinating to bring together all the literature from the privacy quarter and from psychology/psychoanalysis. I suspect there’s a PhD in there somewhere!

I think the central point is that the Internet — and especially those parts of it where most of us “senior” folks rarely go, such as into games and MySpace and Second Life — is indeed creating a different type of personality out there in the demos, and that these are not merely new elites but rather a generation of cyber-literate folks whose attitude toward governance and business is very different from ours — or at least from our views of the ideal. They are indeed “light-hearted” (there was a great piece in the NYT a week ago titled “My Satirical Self” which captures this quite nicely — but sadly it is behind a subscription wall; let me know if you wish the URL) and intelligent, and most importantly, they are still maturing (emerging?) into this intersting population that requires a different approach if “we” are to “reach them”.

Richard S.’s manager friend is, I fear, the very type of person who is is determining the design of e-governance, and that is quite depressing. Perhaps what we need is a more “coolhunting” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolhunting) approach to e-governance, although I don’t think we need take it to an extreme….

—

Regarding the Senior manager, AFAIK he’s not currently doing work for government, but is certainly responsible for policy and forward planning. At his level, he’s responsible for a number of projects, each at different stages.

As I have found in the past with some Senior Civil servants, and those recently retired but still consulting to government on IT, many lack any personal experience of using the government IT systems either as a “worker” or as a “taxpayer.”

These people set policy, perform “gateway reviews” and manage procurements. They are totally dependent on their advisors. Is that sensible?

With the Web 2.0 stuff it’s not an unambiguous term I suppose (and (c) O’Reilly of course). But the plain fact is this stuff is happening too fast to keep up with it and too fast to work out the implications of it. Meanwhile your senior manager has to hit sales targets via procurements that take 18 months or so!

He’d used Google maps, but only for travel directions; occasionally, they use web-conferencing; mostly, they still just work and fly as normal.

Surely democracy is more than government announcing what it will do, then demanding that I pay for it?