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Levy Rivers

Tom Watson MP » Blog Archive » Power of Information: New taskforce and speech - 0 views

tom-watson.co.uk/index.php

data leadership phones coverage prime minister taskforce

shared by Levy Rivers on 02 Apr 08 - Cached
  • We commissioned Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg to write the Power of Information report because we knew that information, presented in the right way, was a potent driver for improving public services and government.
  • Today I am going to offer two arguments that I think compliment the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on public service reform
  • Firstly, that freeing up data will allow us to unlock the talent British entrepreneurs. And secondly, engaging people - using the simple tools that bring them together - will allow the talents of all our people to be applied to the provision of public services.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The difference of course is that today we contend with what Richard Saul Wurman describes as a ‘tsunami of data’
  • My job is to make sure that government can benefit from this new thinking too. When we were first elected in 1997 people had a recipient relationship with data, they got what they were given when they were given it. It was static.
  • In scale, the spread of social media is comparable to the spread of telephones in the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Yet it’s happened in two years not 20.
  • As Clay Shirky would say, we’ve reached a point where technology is simple and boring enough to be socially useful and interesting.
  • Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
  • Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least
  • Richard is here tonight and I hope that after the formal proceedings you might like to share some of your own ideas with him. Richard is also joined by a number of other taskforce members. They’re all people with remarkable track records in this field. We’re lucky. The UK has some of the world’s leading talent.
  • And today the PM announced an initiative that would allow you to find your community Bobbies using your postcode.
  • The taskforce will bring its expertise to bare on existing initiatives to see if we can what we already do better
  • I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.
  • By bringing people onto the taskforce with the skills and experiences of people like Sally Russell we can move further and faster in this area.
  • Two weeks ago the Prime Minister signalled that we were moving public services to the next stage of reform. He said that we were not only going to, further enhance choice but also empower both the users of services and all the professionals who deliver them - to drive up standards for all.
  • Transformational government is about wrapping services around the citizen, not citizens around the services.
  • Last month DirectGov had over 7 million visitors. Peter is seeing the aggregate desires of millions of UK public service using citizens. I had half an hour with him a fortnight ago and came away with a dozen ideas as to how we can improve our public services.
  • I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.
  • And much of that information has the potential to be reused in data mashups. Some of it already is, like Hansard on theyworkforyou, or Google Maps using Ordnance Survey data.
  • The Power of Information Report recognised that, and made recommendations to the Treasury. The Treasury, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, published an independent economic study in the Budget and announced its intention to look at these issues during this spending review cycle.
  • It was this early open source approach that arguably fostered 500 years of Islamic scholarship in important fields like medicine, astronomy, lexicography, literature and science. In contrast, European data was stored in monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As Gibbon wrote in the ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’ the ‘age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years’ and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals?
  • I believe in the power of mass collaboration. I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few. I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever. I said that I don’t believe the post-bureaucratic age argument. It’s just old thinking, laissez faire ideas with a new badge. The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.
  • The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access. The point is, who cares? It doesn’t matter who has the ideas. It’s what you do with them and how you improve on them that counts.
thinkahol *

How Inequality Hurts Societies | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook - 0 views

www.onpointradio.org/...inequality-societies

How Inequality Hurts Societies | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Feb 11
     
    New global research on equality, inequality, and the happiness of nations. It's an American issue.
thinkahol *

Exclusive: Legalization activists slam Obama's renewed commitment to drug war | The Raw... - 0 views

www.rawstory.com/...renewed-commitment-to-drug-war

Exclusive: Legalization activists slam Obama's renewed commitment to drug war | The Raw Story

shared by thinkahol * on 05 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 05 Mar 11
     
    WASHINGTON - The pro-legalization group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition fretted that President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon were embarking on a counterproductive mission after the two pledged "renewed cooperation" on the drug war Thursday. "Legalization is the only way to end the cartel violence, just like ending alcohol prohibition was the only way to make gangsters stop shooting each other over beer and liquor distribution," Tom Angell, a spokesman for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told Raw Story in an e-mail. "How many more police officers and innocent civilians will these leaders allow to die before they finally tackle the one true solution to this violence?" "Both presidents have said recently that legalizing and regulating drugs is a legitimate topic for discussion, so it would truly be a shame if they didn't take the time to talk about this issue when they met behind closed doors," he said.
thinkahol *

Battle for the Heart of the Occupy Movement - 0 views

c4ss.org/8737

Battle for the Heart of Occupy Movement

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11
     
    Center for a Stateless Society Media Coordinator Tom Knapp, summarizing his experience with the Occupy St. Louis movement, reported a movement "with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of 'mild reform Democrat.'"  Most of the people there, apparently, were basically Coffee Party people with better signs and slogans. They're probably not representative of the nationwide Occupy Together movement - the vibe coming from Occupy Wall Street, at least, is a lot more like Seattle. But there really is a contradiction in the movement between those who see it as part of a larger process of creating a new kind of society, and those who see it primarily as a source of pressure on the state to revive the New Deal or Social Democratic model.
thinkahol *

Glenn Greenwald On "America's Lawless Elite" | On Point with Tom Ashbrook - 0 views

onpoint.wbur.org/...glenn-greenwald

Glenn Greenwald On "America's Lawless Elite" | Point with Tom Ashbrook

shared by thinkahol * on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 28 Oct 11
     
    Glenn Greenwald studied law and spent ten years as a litigator in federal and state courts across the country. Now he's a big two-fisted progressive blogger and columnist for Salon.com. And he's out with a blistering critique of what has happened to American law. We've stopped applying it to everyone, says Greenwald. We've carved out an exemption for Americans in the halls of power. We've created what Greenwald calls a "lawless elite" that is running roughshod over our economy and national policy. Over American law. This hour On Point: Glenn Greenwald, and liberty and justice for some.
Levy Rivers

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Bradley Effect? - 0 views

www.realclearpolitics.com/...the_bradley_effect.html

bradley effect polling

shared by Levy Rivers on 07 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat, in 1982 unexpectedly lost his candidacy for governor of California. His defeat followed voters telling pollsters they prefer a black candidate and then voting the other way. In California's primary last Tuesday, Obama lost by a landslide 10 percentage points after a late survey showed him ahead by 13 points and other polls gave him a smaller lead.
thinkahol *

Wait, Did the USDA Just Deregulate All New Genetically Modified Crops? | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...ulate-roundup-gmo-tom-philpott

Wait Did the USDA Just Deregulate All New Genetically Modified Crops? | Mother Jones

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Jul 11
     
    In a surprise move, the agency green-lights Roundup Ready lawn grass-and perhaps much, much more.
thinkahol *

Philly Sacrifices 26 School Kitchens to the Austerity Gods | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...school-kitchens-austerity-gods

Philly Sacrifices 26 School Kitchens to the Austerity Gods | Mother Jones

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11
     
    As the "debt ceiling" fight drags on, the true costs of deficit hysteria are coming due.
thinkahol *

Is Your Meat Habit Giving You Diabetes? | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...pesticides-giving-you-diabetes

Is Your Meat Habit Giving You Diabetes? | Mother Jones

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Jul 11
     
    More research links traces of PCBs and pesticides in factory-farmed meat and fish to Type 2 diabetes.
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