This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

William Heath and others over at the Ideal Government Project are putting together a list of what an ideal e-enabled government would look like, in order to present it to the government CIO (formerly known as the e-Envoy), Ian Watmore. This sort of grassroots activity is really important. They’re well aware of the success of FaxYourMP and TheyWorkForYou, which are aiming to make it easy for us to get in touch with our MPs and know what those MPs are doing. Ideal Government is more about defining the utopia we could be in; a list of proposals for how government can be more accessible, more open, and more enabled for all of us. I’m currently involved in a discussion about how your tax return might let you communicate back to the Revenue what you wanted to see that tax spent on. They need your ideas, because they’ve got a chance to present them to the one man who might actually be able to make them happen. Does all this neat stuff we do—RSS feeds for quick alerting of new things, easy access to data, quick ways to comunicate back to a site owner, weblogs, context-based searching, Atom, public-key authentication—have the potential to make the government better? If it does, if there’s any way that it does, then this is the chance to tell them so. Get on over there, read, and propose.