A bit unexpected but good news I think… there will be a Parliamentary inquiry into e-voting early next year. It will be run by the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee with a sub-committee of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
Hopefully it will be an open and frank exploration of the issues. Submissions can be made until 14th January 2005 to odpmcom@parliament.uk
Reports: Industry Standard and TechWorld
I've just hopped off a tram in East Croydon and now I'm on a slam door train which is crawling towards London. The tram was cheap, quick, clean and reliable. The train is none of those. I'm going to be late to a Voxpolitics do at Westninster grrrr. Bring on the trams!
Bonus thought In Lublin, Poland they have electric buses powered by tethers just like trams are. They look odd but there's no need to lay track. Why do we need track for trams? Isn't road enough?
Last week I managed to finally get me a Blackberry. They're much harder to get hold of then one might think… Anyway eBay came through for me and I settled down to learn the ins and outs of this extraordinary device. The interface is not of iPod simplicity but it is very good when put next to my last experiences of Palm and Symbian interfaces. There really is no good need for a touchscreen in simple PIM applications.
Unfortunately Research in Motion (creators of all things Blackberry) do not support the Mac. So I had to buy some 3rd party software, PocketMac to get synchronisation working. It works great but it felt like going back 10 years when I realised I had to use a docking station and a Windows PC to update any software on the device. Why is syncing still such a fragmented higgledy-piggledy affair? I thought SyncML would sort this mess out but no, we still need to use the software equivalents of duct tape and string to get data in and out of these devices. We should should demand much more from the suppliers.
The European Commission has an incredible service called IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) which rounds up all sorts of great e-government news from across the EU. You can receive very detailed weekly emails on e-goverment and also Open Source in government.
Highly recommended.
Well I haven't been posting as often as I would have liked to recently. But I notice that many other of the blogs I enjoy are in a similar situation. It's that pre-Christmas crazy period when we all try and cram as many projects in as possible.
I spent three days in Antwerp last week and found the city to be quite wonderful, way above my rather low expectations. It's a beautiful place and I was struck by how well old and new buildings were integrated. I kept turning the corner and thinking “why can't we do that in the UK???” Our lack of wide avenues is a major problem but somehow architecturally we don't get 'there' very often. For example on the station development in Brighton they are proposing the most massively inappropriate 42 storey tower… more on Keith's site. It's all wrong, on the top of a hill, very unimaginative design. Pants.
I'm trying to a squeeze an article on e-voting out. It's looking at the US election and I'm surprised at how little there really is to grab a hold of, some glitches and cock-ups but nothing concrete. Did it all run so smoothly? We have no way of telling, which is the point really. I'm very keen to move on from e-voting so once I file the article it will be my last for a while unless something very dramatic happens.
Here's a bunch of links I've been meaning to post for ages…
Stop juggling! How do we deal with the demands of modern-day life? The “Information, Silence and Sanctuary” conference in Seattle explored the issues. The organiser, David Levy, is a fascinating guy – I met him in Brighton last year. More…
The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser. You want it to be useful, but it isn't. It just looks cool. If site mapping rocks your boat check out this rather dated Cybergeography site. Also see the OPTE Project which has some incredible Internet maps.
If you think that most people abuse PowerPoint then see Gettysburg done in PowerPoint, then Edward Tufte's book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint before reading this article in LinuxUser magazine [PDF] which reveals PowerPoint's origins with Whitfield Diffie and the Mac.
A write-up has gone online about the recent 'E-voting: Policy & Practice' event in which I participated.
I got horribly lost in London today. I was accompanying a client to a pitch and admittedly our target was absurdly tucked away but… if I'd had a GPS enabled phone we wouldn't have walked in a huge circle!
I'm also sorely tempted by one of those 3G cards for my PowerBook (well the Vodafone one as they're the only ones to support Macs). GPRS via Bluetooth is ok, but rather slow. 3G data would make those delayed trains a bit more bearable but I'm not sure the Brighton area coverage is any good…
Jason Kitcat 