On the 22nd March the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown gave a speech about “Building Britain’s Digital Future“. It was streamed realtime over the Internet and had a busy and interesting online discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #bbdf.
Prime Minister Brown spoke of the Britain of the year 2020:
“… which leads the world in open, personal, interactive public services and in the new politics”.
I thought this was an insightful vision, and one I also see for Australia. There has been a dramatic shift all around the world as world leaders discuss open government, genuine citizen engagement and what the “information revolution” means to government and the public service.
This is by no means a completely new topic, however to have so many political leaders around the world on the same page at the same time is quite extraordinary, and I believe will put openness and citizen participation at the centre of government policy and strategy for some time to come, a fantastic step forward for democracy and citizen empowerment.
Prime Minister Brown spoke of the “next-generation web”, the semantic web, which means better interactivity between data and people through practical means such as improved metadata, extensive search, data visualisation and interaction tools. Open standards become essential to ensure interoperability and sustainable access to truly contextualised knowledge. Preserving the context of knowledge adds real meaning, allows us to truly understand it, search it, interact with it and importantly, archive it effectively.
Brown announced “£30m to support the creation of a new institute, the institute of web science – based here in Britain and working with government and British business to realise the social and economic benefits of advances in the web”. This I think will yield some valuable results for the entire world, particularly given it will be led by Sir Tim Berners Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.
The overall strategy he announced has three core parts:
1) Access – Fast broadband to every home.
2) Personalising the way citizens interact with government through opening up data and levering technology for better engagement.
3) An ICT efficiency strategy to cut government costs through the applied use of technology to achieve operational efficiency.
It is interesting to reflect on this three part strategy in relation to what we are doing in Australia.
We are also committed to access with the National Broadband Network (NBN) to deliver 90% of Australians 100mbps and 12mbps to all Australians. It is great to see other countries also recognising the important society-wide impact of the digital divide, and taking action to close the gap.
The opening up of data sets on http://data.gov.uk/ in January was also exciting, and they have done some great work around making that project broader than just data with listings of apps, a running blog and other community building elements. Our own http://data.australia.gov.au/ is doing reasonably well with more datasets being added all the time, and many of the datasets now Creative Commons.
The ongoing discussions in the UK and Australia about citizen engagement with both the public sector and the government are also very interesting, as we have some very similar challenges, and we are seeing some real innovation both in the public sector and the political sphere in both countries.
As for the efficiency goal, our Gershon Review and the resulting ICT Reform Program has created not only significant savings for the Australian government and public sector, but has invested half of those savings back into new projects resulting in some innovative outcomes.
I’d like to take a moment to applaud the substantial efforts of Andrew Stott (the Director of Digital Engagement), UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Tom Watson MP, Dominic Campbell and William Perrin for their contribution in this space, and I continue to watch the Gov 2.0 successes and activity coming from the UK with great interest!
I recommend you read the speech and you can watch it along with the accompanying Twitter discussion as it happened.
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It is very good news to see the UK Government take the initiative with Tim Berners-Lee the father of the internet and the semantic web in the Institute of Web Science. May great things come out of opening up public data to improve human involvement in the decision making process and customization of policies and outcomes in the UK and worldwide. Better transparency will improve life.
The UK government has also made moves to shift Crown Copyright across to Creative Commons in May this year (http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2259098/crown-copyright-switches).
This leaves Australia and other commonwealth nations, which have the Queen as their head of state, in the interesting position of still retaining Crown Copyright, which the UK will no longer support in the same manner.
Cheers,
Craig
Its all well and good to say ‘internet access for all’ but unlike the fantastic plans in Australia there is nothing happening in digitalbritain, and the copper cabal are still in charge, conning Gordon and the people into thinking ‘up to 2 meg’ is broadband, and the further con that ‘up to 40 meg’ is superfast. LOL.
Superfast means fibre to the home, not copper. Korea has a gig (1000meg) for a tenner a month. Now that is superfast. In the UK it all seems to be spin..
And they are gonna break what we already have if the dark lord gets the mad digitaleconomy bill through wash-up tomorrow.
Anyway, good luck to you in OZ, you can lead the way for others to follow.
It’s great that BBDF has been picked up in Australia.
Unfortunately, the twitter subtitles are NOT subtitles and myself and other Deaf people are upset that people make reference to how fantastic it is and make reference to the ‘subtitles’. It is not useful for us Deaf people. The twitter stream is a running commentary for hearing people who could follow Gordon Brown’s speech.
That speech took place on 22nd March. IT’S STILL NOT subtitled, sign language interpreted in British Sign Language (BSL), audio described or options provided for easy print versions of the speech for that need it due to dyslexia or Learning Disabilities.
Digital Britain only makes reference to broadband access and getting people online. Never mind that only 1% of websites are fully accessible world wide.
Britain’s Digital Future fails to recognise that 15% of the UK population is Disabled or Deaf and virtual barriers are just as discriminatory as that of physical barriers and society’s attitudes towards Disabled and Deaf people.
Initially the speech transcript was on a different website (BIS) to the video (No 10). Now both are together on No 10′s website but not linked.
Now we are in mists of a general election you can guarantee that the majority of information and videos from all the political parties won’t be fully accessible for those who need it.
It would be great for those interested and involved in all things digital to support the issues around web accessibility and made sure their websites, products, contents etc. are accessible – for the widest possible audience.
Pesky People http:www.peskypeople.co.uk was set up as a direct result of and because Digital Britain doesn’t include us Disabled and Deaf people in it’s future. It challenges, provokes and highlights the inequalities online.
It would be great to get the support we need as we are a voluntary organisation with energy and enthusiasm but no financial resources.
Thanks, Alison @peskypeople on twitter
Depressingly, while Gordon Brown is making exciting sounding, forward thinking, speeches, his government is making awful backward looking law.
The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through parliament after the election has been called, is about anything but a digital economy. I hope Australia has more luck.
I am sorry but while the farcical internet filter plan exists the notion of “open government” is just a fairytale.
watch and learn Australia… don’t let your government be run by tech illiterate politicians as is the case in the UK. We will learn from you, building for the future, you learn by our mistakes. The debill is the biggest scam of modern time, written by the dark lord and his cronies mainly to protect and obsolete music industry who have also refused to move with the times. They can’t control the internet, no matter how hard they try, they can only break IT. And they can never kill the music, that will live forever.
People who continue to show little knowledge and care for their countries digital futures continue to make decisions that will waste so much money for no gain.
A few points,
It’s amazing that so many governments around the world are embracing “genuine citizen engagement” when so many of them are either toying with draconian regime crackdowns (Britain, for a very long time, has been overly intrusive in it’s citizen’s lives) and/or supporting big media and their archaic and outdated copyright system. This leads me to believe that the plans are hollowmen for starters, all talk and no substance. This is not a slap at you Sen. Lundy re: Labor’s policy of filtering, just a comment on the broader situation currently. You cannot promote a digital age while simultaneously promoting 18th century strictures on the flow of information. You cannot truly expect to create new and innovative ways to use and market knowledge if you are reinforcing a media regime that insists on something like region coding, for example.
Secondly, much like the Australian NBN, the British digital future works fine in isolation and in the absence of other information. How many British unemployed are skilled enough to take advantage of the new situation? What plans are in place for retraining? Will British customers use the new service? How much will it cost and will that increase be affordable in a country that is having a hard time? Will 2Mbit really make that big a difference?
Lastly, the digital future is promising as long as their are customers to buy your IP. We all remember the dot com bubble burst? Many companies riding inflated values based on ideas that never actually became reality.
Don’t get me wrong, the idea of ubiquitous high speed access is great. But it has to be affordable and practical and ultimately accomplish something beyond delivery of higher def IP TV. Will it result in bigger employment opportunities for all walks of life or will it advantage those that already have employment opportunities (ie. IT professionals)? Will the medical breakthroughs be worth the cost? Will people de-urbanise now that they can remotely work, or have they moved to urban areas because that’s the lifestyle they actually want?
I don’t need to tell you that it’s a lot more complex than stating a plan to roll out broadband, but I sometimes feel that the enthusiasm tends to blind some to the reality. The optimistic future is wonderful and it’s good that we are aiming towards it. It doesn’t hurt to occasionally check our feet to make sure we aren’t heading for a fall.