Dissident

Tax Bill up 50% under Labour

Juts picked this snippet up from the Tax Payer's Alliance latest report. Even when inflation is taken into account Britain’s tax burden has soared by over 50% in the last ten years under the Labour government, the report claims.

In its report, the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), a lobbyist for fairer taxes, said a combination of up-front and stealth levies has led to a total tax bill of £517billion a year.

In other words, a single British household has seen their annual tax bill rise, helped by fiscal drag, to an extraordinary £20, 700.

“Shamefully,” a significant part of the tax rise has been in the form of ‘stealth’ taxes, the report says, pointing to the 10p sting in last year’s so-called “tax-cutting” budget.

Alongside stealth taxes, there have been “sly increases” in the shape of fiscal drag – the failure to adjust tax thresholds in line with earnings and asset prices.

Over the last decade, the TPA said Labour has hiked taxes in this way by £14 billion a year, partly explaining the group’s view that taxpayers have been ‘ripped off.’

Wallets have been hit even harder because taxpayers have been made to pay additional fees or charges for what used to be ‘free’ or virtually free public services.

For example, the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency now takes £300 million per annum from the sale of driving licences, while its business in personalised number plates brings in another £100 million per annum.

Passport charges are another good earner, the report said pointing out that in 1997 a passport cost £18, but last year the cost soared to £72, a quadrupling in price.

These charges now cost taxpayers nearly £500 million per annum, and the TPA said it fears further costs could be on the way given the  increasing expense of ID cards.  (If  this  touches a nerve -  might be worth checking out No2ID - I'm already signed up!)

But it is the NHS and local authorities which have proved the biggest money-grabbers, the report says.

Its authors said school dinners charges have risen 50% in ten years, parking charges and fines have risen to over £1 billion and hospital car parks raise over £100m in England alone.

Mike Denham, a former economist at the Treasury who authored the report, reflected that “the government has used every trick in the book to drive up the tax burden.”

“Ordinary families are paying a heavy price,” he said. “People are increasingly beset by record levels of taxation and growing service charges, but there has been no improvement in services in return.
“We find ourselves paying more and more for less and less. With rocky economic times ahead, this rate of taxation simply cannot be sustained.”

Matthew Elliott, the TPA's chief executive, believes the British public are being “ripped off in the most shameful way.”

“The cloak and dagger methods the Government is using the squeeze money out of hard working people are deplorable,” he said.

“With fewer police stations, limited GPs’ hours, libraries closing, rarer bin collections and a host of other cuts we are getting less for our money than ever before.

"People are facing higher fuel bills, more expensive food and much bigger mortgage bills – and on top of all that they are being stealth taxed and charged more than ever before. This con has got to stop.”

Here here I say! Roll on 2010 (or preferably sooner!)

New links on Communities of Practice @del.icio.us 2008-05-04

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Tools for Communities Wiki

A companion piece to a forthcoming book Stewarding Technologies for Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith. It collects knowledge about how Communities of Practice use different tools. Like all Wikis, this is a work in progress. It collects knowledge about how Communities of Practice use different tools. The vision is to provide a community perspective on these tools and their key features.

GroupTweet

GroupTweet piggy-backs on the Twitter service via the Twitter API. It allows you to set up a private group on Twitter for sending and receiving text messages (tweets) to members of the group. This tool might be a great introduction to Twitter as quick information sharing tool for a small community of practice and people who are new to Twitter.

Social Media for the socially excluded

I had a meting today with an organisation - HeartsnSoul - who want to create a community web site to bring people with learning difficulties together with potential employers. They want to encourage use of personal blogs for their users and have a virtual meeting place (e.g. forum) where their users can ‘meet' potential employers.

I am looking into the issues and dependencies for providing all this through our existing CoP platform , but I think the interface design requirements may exceed the available budget and there may be implications for the future management and maintenance for what would have to be a separate bespoke development.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with designing, developing or using similar sites (i.e. with heavy emphasis on accessibility and usability), blending social media applications with a simple and intuitive front end design? Or perhaps anyone with experience in this whole area of bridging the digital divide for socially excluded groups. If so, I should be very grateful if you would contact me.

CoPs at the boundary of institution and innovation

David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society has posted some additional comment on the Community of Practice Facilitators Workshop. My thanks to David for his probing questions and insightful comment.

Community of Practice Facilitators Workshop

We had a very good day at the IDeA Community of Practice Facilitator's Workshop on Friday 11^th April. These are regular (bi-annual) events where we get the CoP facilitators (and several guests) together to share knowledge and experience of facilitating one or more of the 300+ CoPs now active across local government.

The day was organised and facilitated by a team from the IDeA, led by Michael Norton, who interestingly enough has just put his toe in the water and started his own blog. I'm sure he'll have lots of valuable things to say about his specialist area - knowledge management.

Socialreporter David Wilcox was there with an eye on proceedings and video camera at the ready. David did a video interview with Michael Norton and me, but not quite sure where this will appear (note - since posted here). David is also trialling video streaming using QIK and his new S60 Nokia so we'll look out for some instant video commentary next time!

One of the key themes for the day was how to make a CoP fly. We used the analogy of the CoP being a hot air balloon, and the need to ensure it could gain sufficient height to cross a mountain range. The injections of hot air being the various activities that a facilitator could take to keep the CoP flying. There's a useful article over at Knowledge Board about this.

We also had a video from Nancy White, who has been chairing a hotseat in the Facilitators CoP for the past two weeks on the topic: Are our assumptions about sustaining groups online out of date in the network era?

My personal interest was in listening to the stories ‘from the coal face', i.e. the experiences of the various facilitators. I have a role as technical steward for the CoP platform, so I want to make sure that the technology is meeting the needs of the facilitators and ordinary members, and that future developments are keeping pace with how the platform is being used. I briefly covered what was being planned for next phase of development, and fortunately the new features seemed to be consistent with what users were asking for. However, I was a bit surprised at how some people were using blogs - not as I had anticipated in that they would be associated with personal comment and promotion on what is happening in a CoP, but in some cases as the vehicle for collecting and distributing confidential CoP comments and documents to just the members of the private CoP. My plans for changing the blog facility from being just internal to each CoP to more of a platform-wide facility to encourage more inter-CoP communication and collaboration may have to be reviewed - though I still think this is a valid need.

Overall it was a very successful day, with lots of useful tips interchanged on how to keep that CoP flying. The benefit of all these type of events is the realisation that you have colleagues out there facing similar issues to you, and can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of a growing cohort of facilitators.

There were a few quotes I will remember:

"I'm not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation"

I'd like to think that CoPs do empower people to make change, but the heavy hand of command and control is still evident in many organisations, and could in some cases snuff out that spark of innovation that is in all of us.

"Someone read and commented on my first blog! I got a real buzz out of that - it's not an ego trip or anything, I'm just so pleased that someone thought I had something interesting to say"

Yes, let's have more of that!

"We're all learning together; IDeA does not have all the answers - it's up to us to help each other"

On that note, I went away feeling quite happy with life!

Web 2.0 vs Accessibility

NOTE: THIS ITEM ALSO POSTED TO STEVE-DALE.NET, WHICH IS NOW MY MAIN BLOG.

I attended an "Enterprise 2.0" event last week where Ian Lloyd gave a very thought provoking presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on accessibility. Ian is a web developer working for the Nationwide Building Society, and clearly knows his stuff when it comes to designing websites that will accommodate assistive technologies - such as screen readers, voice to text and screen magnifiers.

This was particularly relevant to the work I'm presently doing in building on-line environments for support of Communities of Practice in the public sector, where accessibility standards and guidelines for websites is far more rigorously enforced than in the private sector. Conforming to standards such as W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is a given, but websites must also conform to guidance such as Delivering Inclusive Websites, issued by the COI.

Personally, I have some sympathy with developers of 'social media-rich' websites (which I'll categorise as being 'Web 2.0') in that it's quite difficult to find the right balance between accessibility and making the site appealing to a mass audience. Clearly Facebook comes to mind here. However, I'm not sure that vendors/developers do enough to ensure that they have catered for the disabled minority. For example, the Captcha processes used on a growing number of websites are fairly difficult to negotiate even for someone with 20:20 vision.

I don't necessarily think that Social Media has to mean poor accessibility, yet there seems to be a sort of tacit acceptance that this is the case . I'm now far more aware of my obligations in striving to make the CoP platform available to a more diverse audience and will be taking steps to in the next development phase to ensure we're meeting the required guidelines and best practice.

Two very useful resources for anyone interested in issues around accessibility and diversity are Abilitynet and the Shaw Trust.

Top 100 Social Media Tools

I've posted a list of the top 100 Social Media tools over at Steve-Dale.net  (my other blog). See if you agree on the rankings.

Microsoft's Cloudy Vision

 

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Microsoft’s Windows Live efforts are the software giant’s answer to web applications and cloud computing. However, from where I stand, they’re less a cloud strategy than a layer of fog over the multibillion-dollar packaged software franchises that keeps Microsoft going.

Ray Ozzi, Microsoft’s chief software architect, seems to appreciate the scale of the task facing the software behemoth. In his interview with Om, he recognised that their legacy desktop applications were no longer the pivotal point for development: “A student today or a web start-up, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser”

However, the various announcements about online versions of Exchange and Sharepoint, and the beta release of Office Live Workspace all seem to be distinctly underwhelming, and indicative of a “me too” mentality.

Users are getting more familiar with accessing web-based applications, and putting increasing trust in the likes of Google for providing secure services. From a personal perspective, I’m fed up with having to keep patching (mainly Microsoft) applications on my desktop, and finding Windows Vista runs ever more slowly each day (and that’s when it doesn’t crash and burn). I’ve resisted upgrading to MSOffice 2007 because quite frankly, I don’t need the extra features, and am making gradually more use of Google Docs and OpenOffice.  I’ve also started to dabble with Google Apps, and am in the process of migrating all my Outlook email and contact management to the Google environment, hence my reliance on Microsoft is diminishing by the day (unfortunately will be stuck with the Operating System for a while yet though).

Whether things like Foldershare or Skydrive will buy any time for Microsoft I don’t know, but the ad hoc nature of these ‘software plus’ services, the small enhancements to its email and collaboration applications, plus some tweaks that let users access Office documents while away from their main PC, doesn’t collectively strike me as being part of a major strategic rethink in how best to address the web-based picture. It certainly doesn’t appear to be tapping into the power and potential of cloud computing that the likes of Google and Amazon have been forging ahead with. Whether Microsoft’s failure to present a cohesive and compelling strategy is ultimately going to be fatal for them remains to be seen. They do have the benefit of a cash mountain behind them, so I guess they could buy themselves into anything (but not sure that Yahoo is the answer either!). However, I think it’s a bit like turning an oil tanker, and in the meantime Google has docked and is unloading the goods. Interesting times ahead I think.

What has Web 2.0 ever done for us?

The following is an abstract from an item I produced for the IDeA in response to a media query about the impact of Web 2.0 on Local Government.

What is Web 2.0?
The term ‘Web 2.0’ was officially coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc. The term was intended to capture the feeling that despite the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, the Web was ‘more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity’ It was recognised that companies that had survived the dot-com firestorms of the late 90s now appeared to be stronger and have a number of things in common. Thus the term was not coined in an attempt to capture the essence of an identified group of technologies, but an attempt to capture something far more amorphous.

Is it a revolution in the way we use the Web? Is it another technology 'bubble'? It rather depends on who you ask. The short answer, for many people, is to make a reference to a group of technologies which have become deeply associated with the term: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds etc., which facilitate a more socially connected Web where everyone is able to add to and edit the information space.
For the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there is a tremendous sense of déjà vu about all this. When asked in an interview for a podcast, published on IBM’s website, whether Web 2.0 was different to what might be called Web 1.0 because the former is all about connecting people, he replied:

"Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0', it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0."

So, in essence, we can probably summarise as follows:

• Web 1.0 relied upon specialist skills to compose, format and publish content to the web, and consequently was limited to people and infrastructures that had these skills and capabilities. It was also primarily (though not exclusively) used as a broadcast medium for dissemination of information.

• Web 2.0 technology enables anyone to become a web publisher by hiding the (web) complexity behind simple and easy to use interfaces, and hence the proliferation of personal blogs (short for ‘web log’). It also facilitates creativity, collaboration and knowledge sharing through web-based communities and social networking sites (e.g. Facebook).

The impact on local government
It’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how Web 2.0 is being used, deployed or adopted across local authorities, with some clearly seeing the benefits, and others reticent to get involved. Sites such as MySociety are pointing the way, with services such as ‘FixMy Street’ demonstrating how the technology can be used to engage directly with citizens. The entrepreneurial spirit is also evident, with freelance individuals developing sites such as Local Gov Glossary, LGSearch and lgShout, but the question remains as to why these sorts of services are not developed, sponsored or supported by local authorities.
On a positive note, there is growing evidence that more councils are becoming actively engaged in developing online community techniques within councils’ own web services, with Redbridge a notable example. Their use of on-line polls for getting feedback on Post Office closures, and use of interactive forums is pretty much ground breaking stuff for local government. The whole site has that 21st century look about it, – wish there were more like it! Also worth a mention is Chesterblogs, a blogging portal for city councillors. My apologies to any other candidate councils and services not mentioned here, but I haven’t had the time to trawl through over 410 council web sites and several thousand local services to come up with a definitive list (my next project maybe!)

However, broadly speaking, there remains an undercurrent of distrust, particularly where established command and control functions are threatened. The main concern is that employees may be wasting time in the use of non-work related social networks or websites, and in the related security and organisational image concerns. Managers want to know what their employees are doing, and quite often the only way of bringing about greater control in the workplace is by getting ICT departments to block access to sites such as Facebook and Youtube.

(Interesting aside – Hazel Blears’s keynote presentation to the recent International eParticipation Symposium expounded the virtues of using Youtube to get information out to citizens, and explained how DCLG were using this as a key media channel. She is clearly not aware that most government departments block employee access to Youtube for the reasons described above!)

Encouragingly, there do appear to be some enlightened managers working in local government, and to quote David Wilde, chief information officer at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, ”For managers it can be difficult to know what exactly their employees are doing. But the organisation needs to be outcome-based, and I don’t think we should be using technology to prevent access to [social networking] sites. If there are staff performance issues we should address them directly”.

So, in summary, the use of Web 2.0 sites and techniques in local authorities breaks down into several categories:

• the formal and informal use by employees or councils of existing social networking sites such as Facebook;
• use of third-party sites which use interactive or peer-to-peer techniques to try and improve public services, such as the problem reporting service ‘FixMy Street’,
• and the use of social networking or online community techniques within councils’ own web services.

The Improvement Development and Development Agency’s (IDeA) use of Web 2.0
The IDeA recognised the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies and techniques as early as 2005, and in this sense can be considered early adopters. The Knowledge Team identified Web 2.0 as the foundation for enabling people and organisations in the sector to improve the way they work through capturing and sharing know-how. A strategy was developed to improve the way that councils connect with each other to ensure that key learning and experience is shared within and across the sector. A key part of the strategy was the support, development and maintenance of ‘communities of practice’. These communities would connect individuals working in local authorities and provide a collaborative framework in which they can find solutions in areas where there is a common and shared interest.

This led to the development of the community of practice platform, which was launched as a pilot in early 2006, and as a fully supported service in September 2006. This has proved to be enormously successful, with over 9000 registered users representing nearly all local councils in England and Wales. There are presently 290 communities on the platform, devoted to sharing knowledge and best practice around a central theme of local government service improvement.

The platform supports a range of Web 2.0 applications that enable users to find and connect with experts, collaborate on documents, debate in forums and publicise their achievements, all in one integrated and trusted environment. The facilities are free to use for employees in local government and for people and third party organisations working with councils on service efficiency or improvement initiatives. It is currently the most successful community environment for professionals in the public sector.

[Steve Dale has been retained by the IDeA to support and advise on the strategic development of their Communities of Practice Platform and other Web 2.0 services.]

Civil Serf cornered

For anyone following the story in the UK press, and the churn in the blogosphere, it would seem the internet blogger who published accounts of life as a civil servant at the heart of the Brown Government has been identified and suspended, as reported in the Daily Mail.

Known by the pseudonym Civil Serf, she is a middle manager in the Department for Work and Pensions.

All a bit sad really; it was certainly one of the more entertaining blogs to emanate from the public sector, and I'm not sure she said anything that we don't already know about the workings in Gov. It will be interesting to see precisely which rules she is deemed to have broken.