Dissident

Social Media User's Bill of Rights

Came across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it's not enforceable!

Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

More Government micro-management: E-commerce legislation

I wonder how many UK businesses have complied with the e-commerce legislative requirement to include company registration details on their web sites and in their emails? The law became effective from 1st January 2007. If you are a business owner (as I am), you may be forgiven if you didn't hear much about it, because there was little in the way of any direct communication with businesses.  Unfortunately that will be no excuse when the bureaucrats come to dishing out the fines. Details of the legislation can be found here.

New Guidance on use of Council Tax data

I saw this earlier this week on Public Sector Forums and  reflected  on its significance. The Information Commissioner’s Office will today (26th Jan) publish revised guidance for local authorities wishing to make secondary use of Council Tax Data, for example to populate CRM systems. Previous government guidance on data sharing has created uncertainty in many local authorities on whether they can use this data for other council functions, despite the prevailing common sense that having one authoratitive data set is preverable to building several sets of data about a citizen's residantial status. The ICO guidance asks a series of questions together with explanations which outline the ICO's latest approach, answers to which will determine the permissibility of using the data.  The questions are as follows:

• Is it necessary for the local authority to use the information to carry out its statutory functions?
• If council tax information is used for another purpose, what effect will this have on the people the information is about?
• Would using the information cause unwarranted detriment to any individual?
• Would using the information for another purpose benefit those the local authority provides services to?
• Is the information particularly sensitive?
• Will the information be adequately protected from improper use or disclosure?
• Is there an alternative to sharing information in a form that identifies individuals?
• Do individuals understand how the local authority will use their information?

The guidance is available for Download ICO_Tax_Guidance_2007.pdf .

Road Pricing Petition

The government's proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working Mum who used her car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month. On top of this massive increase in tax you will be tracked. Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit in time you can expect a Notice of Intended Prosecution with your monthly bill.

If you care about our freedom and stopping the constant bashing of the car driver, you may wish to sign the petition on No 10's web site.

Why Command and Control is So Bad

Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week has written an article entitled "Lessons from Home Depot's Bob Nardelli - Why Command and Control is So Bad".

Now here's a lesson from the private sector which could easily be applied to Government; autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process, e.g. cost and quality, Six Sigma measures and all that stuff. However, if the UK Government is serious about giving local authorities and and local communities more influence and power to improve their lives - as described on the DCLG Local Government White Paper issued last October, then the present culture of centrally imposed targets and measurements must be relaxed.

Process controls and metrics may still have a place within any organisation that is accountable for its actions - whether this is to shareholders, in the case of a publicly-quoted company, or to citizens if it is a local authority. However, as the article states, controls and metrics are now commoditised sediment and should make way for the discipline and process of innovation. It remains to be seen whether Central Government is serious about devolving power to locally elected representatives, or whether it will insist on maintaining it's 'we know best' attitude and the associated micro-management mechanisms it has established over the past few years.

Government culls web sites

For anyone that didn't catch this headline on the BBC web site yesterday - "Hundreds of government websites are to be shut down "to make access to information easier" for people.Of 951 sites, only 26 will definitely stay, 551 will definitely close and hundreds more are expected to follow".

For anyone even remotely connected to the public sector, as well as ordinary citizens, this can only be good news. The proliferation of webs sites across central government is a consequence of an entrenched attitude that every project or initiative should have a web site - in fact this was usually the first thing that project teams did once they had been handed funding. No thought was ever given to what would happen to the site once the project had completed and funding no longer available.  This 'silo thinking' is endemic across the public sector, and created huge problems in being able to find relevant information - that could well be split across several sites. The fact that it's easy in web-land to provide links between sites and content hasn't occurred to many of the site owners. Removing out of date or irrelevant content is clearly a step in the right direction, and should remove some of the clutter from search engine results.