What role will technology play in parties’ manifestos for 2015?
What role will technology play in parties’ manifestos for 2015? That’s the question I’ll be putting to Nadhim Zahawi (Member of the No. 10 Policy Board), Chi Onwurah (Shadow Cabinet Office Minister) and Dr Julian Huppert (Member for Cambridge) at an event on 4th June at Google Campus. The answer matters: From education to healthcare, […]
Why Government should aim for everyone to have at least basic digital skills by 2020
This article was first published by the Yorkshire Post. It has become something of a cliché to say that the internet has transformed the world. But that’s only because it’s true. Email, social media and apps are changing the way people communicate with friends, family and colleagues. New e-commerce models are creating businesses that five […]
Digital Government: The gap between vision and reality
This blog was written for Open Forum Events‘ upcoming conference: Digital Public Services: Simpler. Quicker. More Engaging. Much has been promised about technology’s ability to radically transform government and public service delivery. Harnessing smart tech is meant to offer the chance to make government leaner, more responsive and more personalised to the needs of individual […]
Why we need a more strategic approach to open data
As the world celebrates 25 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, two events have shown the potential of his other great passion – open data. On Sunday, I was a judge at Rewired State’s National Hack the Government weekend. On Thursday, I shared a panel to discuss open data in […]
What’s wrong with Care.Data?
It’s been a tough few weeks for care.data. The roll out of the initiative – which aims to combine GP and hospital records in the national Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) databases – has been postponed for a second time for six months. Doctors have reported being confused about the respective demands of […]
Schools need all the support they can get to deliver the Computing curriculum
On 25 November I joined a group of teachers, industry leaders, academics and politicians in a Guardian roundtable discussion on the future of Computer Science teaching in schools. The aim was to look at the government’s ambitious agenda to have primary and secondary schools teaching Computer Science (ComSci) from September 2014, and to understand the […]
UK tech start-ups are doing well. Now let’s help them become big businesses
It was pleasing to hear David Cameron use his Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech to reiterate the need to support UK start-ups. He cited progress in “opening up government procurement to start-ups, spending hundreds of millions to stimulate venture capital investment and getting behind technology clusters wherever they start to emerge”, all of which are to […]
