Hopefully over the next few years, software developers, technology companies and the IT industry as a whole will start to take privacy more seriously. We have grown up in the online world with a very naive view of what will happen to our data online....

I am all for Gov2.0. I think that it can genuinely make a difference and help bring public sector organisations and people closer together and give them new ways of working. However, with it comes responsibility, the public sector needs to understand...

Of all the fun topics in IT going around at the moment, privacy is a good one.  There is a lot of press about privacy online and how we are all doomed, however looking at the share price of Google and Facebook, ignoring privacy seems to make pretty...

I have spent a fair amount of time working on government systems, and security has always been a priority.  But what I am finding interesting is the type of threats that they are now taking very seriously – effectively protecting against a cyber...

I am normally glad when privacy stories hit the mainstream media, as the general public need to understand the issues. However I was relatively surprised to see this one from the BBC: German vandals target Street View opt-out homes German home...

Interesting post called OpenID is a Nightmare highlights a few potential problems with the federation model when used in a small business.  The problem is neatly summarised as follows: Let me just preface this by saying of all the failure points...

Just a very quick post to say that more details have been released on SharePoint 2010 Accessibility over on the official SharePoint blog . Well worth a read.

A very interesting day all in all.  It started out with a little trip to London to meet up with Dave Briggs of ukgovcamp and DavePress fame and a fellow Microsoft colleague Dave Coplin .  We spent a very enjoyable hour talking about public sector...

Over time I have written less and less software; the last development team removed my access rights to the source code long before I had even left the project.  But I have always had a passion for delivering software that does what the user wants...

I was in Japan last month (fascinating county, would love to go back and spend more time there) where I spent a week with the local Microsoft team and with Bill Edwards from CSTransform (formerly Gov3). Bill was the UK e-Communications Director under...

I have to admit, I am hugely impressed with the new functionality on offer in SharePoint 2010, it is a huge leap forward. It really is an immensely powerful platform offering a huge range of services. The official one sentence description is “The Business...

UPDATE - Since this blog post more information has been released about accessibility in SharePoint 2010 on the official SharePoint blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/03/09/accessibility-and-sharepoint-2010.aspx After a long wait...

One of the hottest topics in government at the moment is usage of the cloud, and this was one of the topics up for discussion while I was in Japan recently.  The Japanese Government announced earlier in the year the plans to build a private cloud...

Well I have been away on the road for the last couple of weeks at the annual internal Microsoft Sales conference in Atlanta and then in Seattle for TechReady - an internal tech conference.  So I have been too busy to post, but had a great time catching...

  Congratulations and well done to everyone at Spenta, you really deserved to win the Microsoft Public Sector Government partner of the year .  Glad to see you are highlighting it on your rather nice SharePoint based website :) http://www.spenta...

I was working with one of our teams in the Middle East to help them prepare for a presentation to a group of Government CIO’s around Gov2.0.  I put together some slides for them, got some background reading, example sites etc and sent it over. ...

At the Worldwide Partner Conference more details have just been announced around Windows Azure, the Microsoft Cloud Platform.  This short video is a really good and very clear view of what Windows Azure is, and how it works; well worth a quick watch...

There are three interesting posts this week from various sources around Social Media.  First one really underlines why it cannot be ignored.  After reading the post ‘Social media now more popular than personal email – Neilsen’ and looking at...

The BBC website has an article ‘ Twitter to give bushfire alerts ’ where it explains that after this years tragic bushfires in Victoria, the State will use Twitter in future to keep people up to date. I think that Twitter can be a huge help in these situations...

As reported on localgov.co.uk , Croydon council has had to suspend its use of Twitter after a member of the council staff used the account to criticise a reporter.  I find the statement they released slightly bizarre: A spokesman said: 'We need someone...

Like all things there are good and bad examples of Gov 2.0.  One of the main drivers for Gov 2.0 should be a reduction in cost of communication with citizens and I came across two separate examples with different outcomes. Spenta , a Spanish partner...

I know when someone first started to describe to me the concept that the government should not hold data about me, but rather I should hold it instead – it took me a little while to understand why this was a good thing. A paper has been released by the...

I am rather enjoying Andrea DiMaio’s latest post – It is time to explore the dark side of Government 2.0 .  As I have noted a few times here , here and here not everything is always rosy in the Gov 2.0 garden.  One of the issues that I see is...

Gov 2.0 can and will effect all levels of governments and associated agencies. Over on the Headstar e-government blog there is a case study of Web 2.0 in Local Government which sparked my interest for two reasons. Firstly and totally unrelated to the...

Tim Berners-Lee has published a set of notes that he has written after talks with various people in the UK and US governments.  They are pretty rough and high level, but interesting to see the direction he is taking after his appointment . It is...