In case anyone’s interested I did an interview on ‘my trip’ overseas recently which if you fancy a bit of light and slightly educational entertainment is here.
Anyway, the main burden of my remarks is that we’re losing ground within the leaders group on eGov and Government 2.0 (which I see as somewhat different things). The UK have been stepping up the pace and are now way ahead of us on the digital agenda including the PIMS agenda – personal information management services – which we’ve barely begun to work on.
This year every student studying at MIT will be given their own bitcoin wallet and $100 in bitcoin. Sounds like a fantastic way to kick off an ecosystem to build the internet of money!
We’re not distinguishing ourselves in this area. The UK has had three PMs pushing the digital agenda – Blair, Brown and Cameron. The US has had Silicon Valley pushing things along and Obama driving things with all sorts of highly talented people brought into the administration.
Us? Not so much, from either party.
Someone pointed out that AGD has been taking policies that should be under Communications; who do you think would be more innovative, lawyers or a merchant banker? (well, Turnbull was a lawyer too, but let’s not hold that against him)
How are other governments making whole of government change? The impression I get of most departments is they are fiefdoms, strongly resistant to any initiative imposed from outside.