WRITTEN ON January 7th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Save Time and Money, Transformational Government, What do we want?

Hurrah. I see from Kablenet that Directgov has appointed three new directors.

Injection of fresh blood is just what DirectGov needs. Obviously we need wonderful, clear, well designed online services. DirectGov, the “flagship” has fallen into a dark place of editorialising in a broadcasting PR monotone, backed with a self-referential and hilariously inept search service.

But soft…who are the new appointments? Is it the MySociety posse? Stef from Moo? Sam of DirectionlessGov? The founders of Headshift? Are they bloggers and creatures of the contempory Internet, who can help DirectGov see the error of its ways?

No! It’s Channe 4-man, whose last post was chief operating officer at ITN. But…but….but that’s about running a broadcaster! We dont want DirectGov to broadcast at us!

And it’s big consumer brand-man, fresh from British Airways, Scottish Widows and Barclaycard. But….but……but we dont want “the world’s favourite web site” with sexy women dressed in mourning chargings us 18.7% APR and sharing our personal details with TfL! We want good, honest contempory internet services! We want APIs. And we dont want you to waste oceanic quantities of our hard-earned tax money!

And finally, it’s the former IT director for insurance intermediary the BGL group, whose brands include Fusion. ACMulr and the little-known comparethemarket.com. But….but….but……we dont want public services to be flogged to us like financial services! We want to co-create them ourselves, to participate and to care.

Gentlemen, it’s a fair cop and you all have wonderful experience in your own fields. But this has to me the feel of a “risk avoidance” set of appointments which maximises the risk that DirectGov will continue to be expensive, overbearing, centralising and editorialising, not light on its feet at all in the spirit which the contempory Internet requires. Please prove me wrong.

Final thought: when you go to DirectGov and search for “new directors” the first search result is called “Arranging a funeral”. But they can’t be dead yet! They’ve only just been appointed! (The second is about measures to tackle hospital bugs.) Hey!

If however you go to Google (for which taxpayers have not forked out £50m and counting) and search for DirectGov new directors you get a COI press release about new directors. But the COI web site appears to be down.

So, there are some things to fix for 2009.