How the Government Gateway works

Caveat: this is not a technical description of how the Gateway works. Nor does it cover the behind-the-scenes services that the Gateway provides in terms of messaging and interoperation between various government systems. But it is my description of the…

The Weakest Link

(Yes, that is me on the left…) Imagine you have some diamonds. Small, valuable and very, very desirable. You don’t want them to get nicked, so you lock them in a safe with a bloody massive key. Made of splendonium…

Indeterminately public

I did a thing that might have been very wrong yesterday. But I’m not sure. So this is part confessional, part taking advantage of it as a vehicle for discussion. (And a fair bit of hand-wringing into the bargain.) I…

Data.gov.uk one year on

A year, almost to the day, from the launch of data.gov.uk it seems clearer that it was really trying to fire at three targets simultaneously: transparency, usefulness and good old commercial value. Three targets that have some overlap, but also…

The trust paradox

Although we think that “being open” will increase trust and transparency, the reverse is more likely. I came to this paradoxical conclusion after reading an interesting piece on perverse economics [link; but summarised here to save you jumping around]: why…

Why the big fuss?

The usual parade of whimsy on this blog about this or that in public services, or things-that-make-my-head-hurt-in-general, has been rudely interrupted by a series of diatribes on identity and trust online, with a focus on people interacting with government. Why,…

The Nature of the Relationship, part 2

In which we look more deeply into that business of what an online trusted relationship actually means—over and above the mechanics of actually “proving” something about it to a particular degree. New readers will probably want to read an introductory…

The Nature of the Relationship, part 1

This is where the going gets tougher. The previous post here was about the different things we use to bodge our way around the minor inconvenience that you can’t actually prove anything about identity with absolute certainty (and it’s all…

Who are you again?

This online identity stuff is very difficult—as I’ve written here before: much harder to truly grasp than it should be, in a peculiar way. I think that one of the reasons is that there are really two, logically separate things…

Queue balls

A quick visit to post a small parcel. And, as an added bonus, a nice view of a broken public service. The Charing Cross main Post Office is just off Trafalgar Square, and gets pretty busy—especially at lunchtimes. Last time…