WRITTEN ON April 1st, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information, Transformational Government, What do we want?

Jam fan Tom Watson, the improbably on-the-case blogging Cabinet Office Minister in charge of Transformational Government announced a Power of Information task force at IPPR this evening. UPDTE: Tom’s speech is here, all beautifully linked (he must have been up till midnight! Perhaps CabOff will also release a pdf in due course 🙂

Hurrah: it’s to be chaired by Captain Sensible himself: blogger Richard Allan (Nick Clegg’s predecessor as LibDem MP for Sheffield Hallam who now works for Cisco doing government affairs stuff). Most people I’ve met in this entire community turn to Richard for advice on most things deeply political and technical anyway, so Tom is craftily cutting out dozens of middlemen here.

Tom sees the Power of Information agenda as the most important part of his brief. He’s gearing up to “free our data”, arguing that the rationale for trading funds has changed with the times. It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, and a new way for government to speak with itself.

He said some other good stuff:
– CoI and Cabinet Office are drafting a social netwoking code. It needs to conform to the letter of the civil service code but also live in the spirit of the times
– Gordon Brown now has a Twitter channel (was that an early 1 April ref?)
– he sees immense potential for internal blogs, wikis and discussion fora to improve how makes policies

This is all pretty, well, Ideal really, and chocabloc with potential Wibbies. What e don’t yet know is how this plays out when it hits every other department and Minister’s agenda. Tom has the power to persuade, but no executive authority or budgetary control over others. Some are keen, others will take some persuasion; it’s the mother of all change agendas. But we’ve got an enthusiastic starting point.

Full terms of reference for the Power of Information “task force” (or “support group”, as non-Thacherites and pacifists might prefer to call it) are TBA, also membership. But from a few smiley-eyebrows in the pub afterwards I detect there are already some promising choices.