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Evidence to Select Committee inquiry into Digital Government
On 27 November 2018, along with Dai Vaughan, I gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Digital Government. Courtesy of the House of Commons, you can read the transcript, or watch the video below. Bewarned, it’s about an hour long. A couple of tech journalists wrote it up, while The Times picked… — read more
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Interview in Offscreen Magazine
Last year I was interviewed by the mercurial Kai Brach for his magazine Offscreen, which seeks to highlight the human side of technology, and does so in style. You should subscribe. Quite understandably, Kai doesn’t normally allow the contents of Offscreen to be republished online, but wanted our conversation to get a wider audience, so… — read more
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How Public Digital helped set up the Ontario Digital Service
A few weeks ago, the Ontario Digital Service published its Digital Action Plan, opening with this statement: “We are redesigning government for a digital world. The goal is simpler, faster and better end-to-end services across a people-centered government.” In her statement at the beginning, Chief Digital Officer Hillary Hartley added: “How might we create simpler,… — read more
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Thank you, Liam
I first met Liam Maxwell in February 2010. It was at a Tory-dominated event called “The Network for the Post Bureaucratic Age”. Not one of my usual stamping grounds. William Heath and Tom Steinberg had urged me to go, but it was only the chance to hear a keynote by my hero Heather Brooke that… — read more
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“Distribute power as widely and irretrievably as possible”
From Danny O’Brien’s 1997 email describing a trip to SF to meet Louis Rossetto, founder of Wired magazine. At the time Danny and Tony worked on Wired’s UK edition, as did I. … — read more
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Ten rules to help design a digital, democratic government
The peerless Richard Pope has published 10 rules for anyone redesigning a democratic government to make the most of this digital era. Richard’s 10 Rules for designing a digital, democratic government are: Split data from services. Hold it in organisations with appropriate accountability (central government, local government, professional bodies) and make the quality of the data independently verifiable.… — read more
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Blockchain vs Democracy (aka ‘software is politics, now’)
The Economist succinctly nails the issue I have with “federated trust” distributed ledgers such as Blockchain / Ethereum: The idea of making trust a matter of coding, rather than of democratic politics, legitimacy and accountability, is not necessarily an appealing or empowering one. To be clear, append-only, immutable, verifiable ledgers (distributed or otherwise) are properly exciting as a… — read more
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Keynote at Web Directions 2015, Sydney
Run by the wonderfully energetic John Allsopp, Web Directions 2015 is a cross-disciplinary conference for those blessed with living the Southern Hermisphere . It’s been going since 2004, and was held this year in Luna Park, a surreal 30s-era funfair in the shadow of Sydney Harbour bridge. I was invited to give the closing keynote… — read more
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Presentation to Code for America Summit 2015
Here’s a link to the presentation I gave to this year’s Code for America Summit. It explains why I believe a new institutional architecture is required to support a natively digital nation, and what form these new institutions might take. It’s basically me presenting the ideas of Richard Pope. The video of the talk will be more meaningful, but… — read more
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Stuff that matters, done the right way
There are so many committed teams delivering digital services all over government, it feels unnatural to highlight just one – but when it comes to doing stuff that matters, at scale, and under pressure, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) team developing the Universal Credit (UC) Digital Service is impossible to ignore. Here’s a… — read more
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Tom Loosemore 