European Union :”ICT Is The Lifeblood Of The Knowledge Society”

Minister Åsa Torstensson also emphasises that our future growth and prosperity will lie in knowledge-intensive products and services and that  ICT is the lifeblood of the knowledge society.

Commissioner Viviane Reding underlines the importance of an internal market for the digital economy in Europe and that is what the Visby declaration is heading for, she says. Commissioner Reding furthermore highlights the importance of fibre, high speed networks all over Europe , both fixed and mobile and that is essential that  this infrastructure and services are available to all citizens in Europe. To solve legal and technical problems presented by transnational online services, Commissioner Reding proposes a solutionRead more at www.egovmonitor.com

Ordnance Survey maps to go free online

PM to open access to 2,000 data sets in victory for Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian’s three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US.

In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data, possibly including all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences.

It is thought transport providers, such as train, tube and bus companies, will lose the right to demand a hefty fee from companies such as independent travel websites and firms devising programs for mobile phones, who want to publish such information. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

Aussies unleash data flood

To help spark interest in the competition, the Government 2.0 Taskforce brought an army of 150 geeks together in Canberra over the weekend for a coding marathon called Govhack.

Participants formed teams to develop and demonstrate their applications and, at the end of the event, a panel decided that the best mashup was LobbyClue, which combines data from the lobbyist register, contract notices, business names and other information to produce visual representations of relationships between government organisations and businesses.

Other notable apps created on the weekend include It’s Buggered Mate (reporting damaged public facilities directly to the relevant council), Know Where You Live (providing statistics on Sydney suburbs based on their postcodes) and Rate a Loo (identifying public toilets in the user’s immediate area). Read more at www.stuff.co.nz

Milwaukee CIO turns to cloud computing, mainframe outsourcing and thin clients amidst budget cuts

Milwaukee County’s CIO, Dennis John is facing huge budget cuts for his 2010 budget which requires cutting 400 IT and related jobs. In response he is planning increased us of cloud computing, outsourcing mainframe staff, as well as replacing some 4,500 desktops with thin clients beginning next year. This plan is in reaction to a predicted $2 million budget cut being planned by the county according to an article on Network World.

Thin client usage remains small, but Gartner Inc. forecasted earlier this year that thin client terminals and diskless/repurposed PCs will comprise 10% of all professional client devices by 2014.Read more at wistechnology.com

Against Transparency

The perils of openness in government.

The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently.

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. TRead more at www.tnr.com