For the last few years, Cisco have run a public services summit in Stockholm for two days in December (since they are based in California, that’s one way to suggest that this is not a jolly). They have been good at getting high-powered speakers and participants – this year from 55 countries. Last year David [...]
The Stockholm summit divided its time almost equally between fairly formal plenary presentations, some of which I have already written about, and smaller and less formal working sessions, where the discussion to presentation ration was much higher. I went to the one on ‘breaking down silos’, billed as being about ‘the strategies governments need to [...]
A completely serendipitous encounter on a bus led to a fascinating conversation about the Map of Medicine with one of its inventors. The original idea came from the Royal Free, and is part of the Connecting for Health programme, but it is now being developed commercially (though apparently costs to HMG are zero, because of [...]
William Heath was a last minute addition to the Stockholm programme, giving a rumbustious presentation based on some of the themes of Ideal Government, and a variant of a session he led at the e-government ministerial conference last month. His main themes were participation and trust – which he sees as inextricably linked. Trust is [...]
John Hennessy is the president of Stanford University. PDP11 fans everywhere will also know him as the inventor of RISC. He was talking about the 21st century university, extolling the virtues of collaboration and mixing cultures, supported by modern communications. Hennessy saw four drivers for change in universities: Globalisation: the need to appreciate the culture [...]
One of the more interesting breakout workstreams was on ‘the trust cluster’ – which unfortunately was not the one I was in. I did though have a very interesting conversation with one of the presenters in that group. Malcolm Crompton, who was until recently Australia’s privacy commissioner and is now the MD of an outfit [...]
David Osborne wrote Reinventing Government over ten years ago, and has suffered the fate of many of his ideas becoming received wisdom, without any particular recognition that he had them (or at least gathered and published them) first. His current big theme is The Price of Government, the core idea of which is that government [...]