WRITTEN ON September 27th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
It’s time to wind this thing down. The Guardian owns and pays for this site and domain, and has decided the blog has run its course, which is entirely their prerogative and fair enough. They’ve been great for the last two years.
We’ve got, I think, a final four weeks before it closes end October. I’ll try to have backed up the content which has some gems and nuggets, vital to the future historian of wibbies and of the Benighted ID Scheme.
I’ll be blogging personal and idealgov stuff over at williamheath.net, and e-government matters European will be covered at malmo09.org. My new work is covered at Mydex.org (which is quiet in blogging terms but busy behind the scenes) and at Ctrl-Shift (which is busy, blogs, and tweets too). Between them Mydex and Ctrl-Shift will seek to put right the things going wrong with personal data we have described over the years here (whether under the categories Identity, Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust or co-creation.
In a way this multi-author blog has done it’s job, and we’re increasingly just reporting stuff in the slightly smug but valid category “We told you so”. In another sense now, more than ever, is the time the online community needs to summon the energy and focus to tell a potential incoming administration just what we want from ideal e-enabled government – a crowd-sourced Wibbi in response to Transformational Government and the Benighted Scheme.
Of course that has to happen. But it won’t be on this site.
14 Responses to “IdealGov enters its final four weeks”
Perhaps you could please leave the site up with all it’s past posts?
And on the from page have RSS feeds of where you will be posting?
Please?
Oh no! I know it’s all going to be federated, not centralised, and we will be able to control the links for ourselves. But this transition dismays me. It was so much easier to have it all under one roof….OK, hoist by our own petard.
William, it’s important that this DOES continue. As David says, this is a community. Can’t you just put it all onto a WordPress account? or is that too obvious? or something?
You say it’s the Guardian’s prerogative to pull the site, which of course you must. However I don’t say it. What I say is that the Guardian are being injudicious in pulling the site. It’s a unique community and a resource. Behind it all is something that’s very much in line with what the Guardian is trying to do. Let them by all means change the terms or widen the remit, but we should be building on it, not dismantling it. Not at this time.
And of course the most important thing of all: what will become of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom???
OK, well I’m meeting them on 6 Oct, so let’s have our suggestions and points clear for then. AFAIK they originally were minded to hand the domain and responsibility over to me, but since have taken a view the “Ideal Government” brand is worth hanging on to but they dont want the responsibility (read Liability I guess) for something they dont manage or control.
Sir Bonar is in fine fettle and has found his real medium which is the Twitterverse: twitter.com/sirbonar
It’s interesting to think about what the Guardian will do with a brand which has very significant value – both in terms of content, & vibe/approach (eg WIBBIs). If Ideal Government appeared elsewhere, without the community, it would be Ideal Government, would it. That would be weird.
Meanwhile, what’s the opposite of a barnraising? Surely a party is on the cards??
errr I meant it WOULDN’T be IDG, of course…!
How did the Oct 6 meeting go?
Er, maybe you shd be running this not me. You remembered. I forgot to go. Literally, plain and stupid. I’ve been forgiven and were rescheduling.
Thanks all. I’ve enjoyed reading this blog for the past few years.
Mr Heath, William, Sir, please Sir, absent http://www.IdealGovernment.com, where do I put references like the following (apart from the No2ID website)?
iPhones could be used for citizen ID:
Directgov chief technology officer David Matthewman told an audience of IT professionals at the Innovate ’09 conference on Tuesday that the government is looking for authentication methods or tokens for use across all government websites.“It could be biometric fingerprints in the long term,” said Matthewman. “In the short term, it could be an applet on an iPhone, it could be a smartcard. We are agnostic and we are looking for your opinion.”
…
Andrew Tyrer, network security platform leader at the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that citizens being able to specify their own privacy settings for their dealings with government was important.
“Privacy and consent informs this work,” said Tyrer. “We will address privacy and understand the concerns.”
4 weeks nearly up, what happened in the meeting?
Oh, er, ah. Didn’t I say? I got distracted and – er – forgot to show up. Most embarrassing. But Ive been graciously forgiven and it’s rescheduled for tomorrow. Alarm, knot in hanky etc etc. And fingers crossed.
You did say… but not when it was rescheduled for, and thought it must have happened by now.
We anxiously await to read your report…
Um, 85 minutes time 🙂
If this goes down I’l report on williamheath.net
So. Radio WIBBI is going off air. Except that it’s not. It will continue to broadcast from several other frequencies. No need for condolences.
You have helped, William, you have helped hugely, to promote debate and understanding of the privacy issues raised by eGovernment. The problems seem to be endemic.
If that is the case, then it follows that eGovernment should be severely constrained. It may be that a lot of eGovernment is simply impossible and not deliverable. In those areas, we should stop asking for eGovernment or believing that it is possible or desirable. We should eschew it, give up on it, put it back in the box, forget about it, abandon it and look with suspicion on anyone advocating eGovernment.
Somewhere at the heart of the problems is a contradiction. We want people to be identified. And we don’t want people to be identified. Both. Simultaneously.
The suggestion is that we can have it both ways, thanks to Messrs Chaum and Brands, and their “credentials”. It sounds too good to be true. So it probably is too good to be true. I can’t understand how it works. Can you? If so, can you make that a priority – to have a teach-in? To educate people how a government can govern while the governed are known only by pseudonyms?
If the idea is that it is OK to give your identity to Microsoft or Google and then use a Microsoft- or Google-supplied ID to communicate with the government, then … no. There is nothing to stop governments insisting that Microsoft or Google disclose the real identities.
Could you also somehow keep us informed how IBM are getting on with their “identity grid”?
Which brings me to my main point. To congratulate you.
Through your tireless openness to new ideas you have created a community or family of politicians and civil servants and technocrats. They could look at http://www.idealgovernment.com and get – as near as damn it – the truth. A rare luxury, when most people communicating with that family have axes to grind and political agendas to promote, with the truth subservient to those senior aims.
That is a family of people. Not electronic identities. People. Most government requires people. People can make judgements. eGovernment only works where judgement is unnecessary. That’s why I suspect that it doesn’t work very much at all.
That family will continue to need the truth. You have created something. Something of value. Not many people do. Well done and congratulations. And keep it up!