WRITTEN ON April 21st, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information

I met Tom the other evening over a Chinese meal. I think I was hoping we would draw up the “Kam-Fuk Declaration” on a napkin, with headings like

1. Make government navigable

2. Deliver pre-emptive Freedom of Information (FoI)

Tom is half my age and much smarter about technology. What MySoc has achieved is globally recognised as fundamentally new, exciting and controversial. I tend to think of Tom as way more radical than me. But he’s worked at the centre of government (which I never have) and keeps wrong-footing me by being wise beyond his years as well.

Example: He spotted way in advance that the MPs on the PASC might be in a weird pointey-fingers mood. I just thought “we’re be really helpful to them and they’ll love us”. They ended up pointing at me, not him.

I reckon this review is a significant opportunity for Tom to spell big underlying truths about information and government, and point to the right things to do.

I really want him to select “Tom Paine” mode. Write something to blow away the cobwebs, appeal to people who live in Lewes, confound the DGIs* and warm our cockles decades to come.

I want to unpack the two questions above. Explain what they really mean in technical terms, and what the cost-benefit might look like. Explain why personal empowerment, far from being the driving force of government’s IT strategy, is the crucial missing dimension. Correct the delusion that the power iof information should be used by government to control people, when people can use it to help each other. Why it’s a waste of time and resources to agonise about whether or not to release material under FoI when you could make anything that is susceptible to FoI openly accessible anyway. Why public feedback should remain public not (c) Dr Foster acting as the exclusive licensed agent of the secretary of state for health. How using good web standards and RSS feeds will let an ecosystem of detailed services arise where it is needed.

Also to spell out the downside: how government clumsily tramples on some of the most promising independent information initiatives based on government data, from the legendary fishing licence, via UpMyStreet to, we fear, Patient Opinion. MySociety knows these encounters better than anyone.

Government information policy should be like designing a garden in which you expect things to grow, not setting everything in concrete.

Tom takes a view there’s little point in writing things that will be toned down or edited out, or in making recommendations that cost money and would get thrown out by HM Treasury. Is that realism, or self-censorship? We’ve got two or three weeks to share ideas with him.

Acronym count: 3DGIs = those who Don’t Get It (and never will). I’m sure you know a few…