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NHS Weight Loss app: Three million downloads wasted?
Like millions, I need to lose weight. And like millions, a well-designed weight loss app could help me change my eating habits. Ideally an app I can trust to put my interests first. And if it’s free, all the better. While it ticks the ‘free’ and ‘trusted’ boxes, sadly the NHS weight loss app is… — read more
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To make things right, make them for everyone
One sign that your website isn’t meeting the needs of all your users is when Matthew Somerville gets sufficiently grumpy about it to do a proper version himself. I first came across Matthew in the early 2000s when he got cross enough to build an accessible version of the Odeon website, allowing people whose needs… — read more
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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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Tom Loosemore 