>>
If you didn't catch it yesterday, Mike Saunders, Director of Digital Media =
at Kew posted an update on our blog yesterday.
It's a short piece about Kew's recent mentions in the Digital Britain repor=
t and a new pilot project we're embarking on with Nesta, exploring new appr=
oaches to digital procurement and IPR in the public sector.
You can read Mike's post in full here...we'd love to hear from you. Thought=
s and comments welcome...
http://digitaladventures.wordpress.com/
>>
Thanks Claire. Mike's post links to a chapter from the "Digital
Britain" report:
http://bit.ly/MeA59
My first impressions of the chapter are that there's a lot of it (18
pages). My tip is to skip straight to stuff in bold which are the
core recommendations. The first section is taken up with general "How
did we get here" type stuff but then a bit further in it starts to
get more interesting and actually starts to make quite a bit of
sense. Key bits I picked out are (my paraphrase):
25) Scary and long winded tender processes put off small companies
who would produce innovative work.
Contracting your whole project to one large established
contractor who then subcontracts smaller companies also kills
innovation because the large contractor is keen to minimise any risk.
33) Rather than everyone run their own (different) web servers it
makes much more sense for the government to run a central cloud (The
"G-Gloud" - how do they come up with these names?) and everyone can
then just run their web services on this. For anyone who's ever sat
in a NOF meeting debating "How much will it cost to maintain our
servers - and how will we raise the money" this sounds like a good plan.
There's also a section which recognises that the current situation
with public section IPR and Crown Copyright is a bit rubbish and
points to a pilot project being done by Kew, the Tate and some others
to improve things. If anyone involved could give more details about
this, that would be great.
As I said I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of good sense in
the report so I'd encourage others to have a look and feed back their thoughts.
Cheers
Joe
Joe Cutting
Computer exhibits and installations
www.joecutting.com
35 Hospital Fields Road, York, YO10 4DZ
01904 624681
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