WRITTEN ON April 30th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information
Tom Steinberg, he of MySociety and the #10 Steinberg review on the power of information, has put out a call about user-generated content:
Can you perhaps point us to:
1. Examples of places where civil servants or other public officials successfully engage in other people’s user-created sites? (I’m loath to say in other people’s discussions, because if they were making useful additions to wikis, that’d be fine too).
2. Examples of public servants who have been stopped from engaging for what seem like either good or bad reasons.
3. Examples, good or bad, where governments gave either monetary or other support to non-government user-created websites. What did they give? What did they get out of it?
4. Stand out, clear-as-daylight examples of Uncontroversially Good Things that happened when government officials did deign to contribute to other people’s sites. And vice versa.
In the words of the song about that poor fellow: whose meaning was ambiguous: “Let him have it!”. Just the feedback, I mean. The examples are probably fairly few.
I can think of:
1. Owen Barder – his own site
Ideal Gov – couple of Ministerial postings. Good effort by Jim Murphy;
wooden PR piece attributed to Hazel Blears (was she even aware of it, I wonder?) rightly flamed
2. Public servants wh have been stopped
That policewoman in south London (got it somewhere on Ideal Gov)
What we’re trying to do at Blindside www.blindside.org.uk happens in a culture of presumption that public ser
4. Nigel Hickson (then DTI) on the ukcrypto list –
Questyion 3 is too narrow. What about whether clumsy or inappropriate action by government has damaged or closed down non-government user-generated feedback services (apart from UpMyStreet, geographical data generally, and the infamous fishing licence). What about non-FoI?
8 Responses to “Can we furnish examples for the Steinberg review?”
Presumably “Watson” should be read as “Watkin” in Ian’s comment above. [quite right M: corrected]
“2 Examples of public servants who have been stopped from engaging for what seem like either good or bad reasons.”
“Home Office “Field Intelligence Officer” being investigated for contact with Spy Blog ?”
http://spyblog.org.uk/2005/08/home_office_field_intelligence.html
“Minor changes to the Civil Service Code might affect whistleblowers”
http://spyblog.org.uk/2006/06/minor_changes_to_the_civil_ser.html
There must have been some Good Things that have happened out of David Miliband’s blog? I don’t have time to watch it, so can’t point to an eg.
Did Defra (once they sorted out the wreckers) ever get something good out of its attempt to use a wiki to develop policy?
I wonder whether there’s been any offical engagement with NetMums – or whether NetMums has ever been used to test ideas by officials? on second thoughts, probably not..
Might Q 2 be opened out to include civil servants who have perhaps not been stopped (yet), but have felt the hand of doom creeping up on them – thus they have stopped (or modified) engagement because they perceive that they will get stopped?
Digg this! I think we’ve found an example of a design for pre-emptive FoI in DfID…dont let me forget this Tom; may take some more digging.
….by Ruth that is. Cheers Ruth!
It will be interesting to see what Tom’s review comes up with. When we gave evidence they were impressively attentive, interested and inquisitive about all the right things.
Having run a citizen-feedback site (www.patientopinion.org.uk) for 2 years we’ve got some strong views about how this should be done, who should run it and how best to ensure that civil society and not just the government and comercial world get the real benefits. And if you’d like to know more do take a look at http://blog.patientopinion.org.uk/ for on-going takes on these issues
“Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death” Wired, Feb 2007
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.
“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,” said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology.
The rules: http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/army_reg_530_1_updated.pdf
The link is blacklisted for some weird EE reason but it’s www then
wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/army_bloggers
Do we know who he is interviewing yet ?
Simon Watkin of the Home Office has also contributed most helpfully for several years to the ukcrypto mailing list. FIPR praised Hickson and Watkin in a response to the government’s e-democracy consultation in 2002; Watson is still plugging away 5 years later.