Comment "When I use a word, it means just what I choose
it to mean - nothing more and nothing less". - Humpty Dumpty
in Wonderland
A British web evangelist has been commissioned to consider how
the government might intervene in independent web communities.
The Cabinet Office has commissioned Tom Steinberg, the web advocate
who runs the Prime Minister's e-petitions website, to write a
report that defines how the government might get involved in the
citizen web and link it to government services.
Steinberg became an official advocate of government intervention
in the web when he joined the launch of a curious offshoot of
the Cabinet Office's wide-ranging policy review last month. To
date, the policy review has considered how data protection law
might be watered down so the Cabinet Office can implement its
"Information Sharing Vision".
Yet Steinberg's appearance on the scene last month as the officially
nominated representative of the web "community" was
heralded by a new application of the Cabinet Office's "information
sharing" moniker.
Till now, the policy review's definition of information sharing
accorded with everyone else's. The government has talked of breaking
down barriers between departments that cause people inconvenience
by forcing them to deal with multpile departments, for example
to report a death. It also concerned how the government might
share information between its databases so it can create profiles
of people who have the potential to cause harm and then intervene
in their lives to make sure they don't. As you might expect, information
sharing is quite a controversial idea.
Now the Cabinet Office is also using "information sharing"
to describe the whole contemporary web phenomenon - web 2.0, the
blogosphere, or whatever you want to call it; till now, the web
has not needed any government to give it a label.
Last month, Steinberg and his chums at the Cabinet Office hosted
a seminar of successful community web-heads like netmums who where
all "hailed" by the government spin-meisters as "a
new force for social progress". They were lauded for bringing
"power to the people" and "democratising information".
Tell us something we don't know. But think: these people all
share information - that's basically what the web is, it's communication,
information sharing. Can the web lend the government's information
sharing plans an innocuous veneer?
As it happens, Cabinet Office minister Hilary Armstrong announced
that her policy review would be casting its net over the citizen
information sharers as well.
"The issue is about enabling rather than monitoring the
appetite people have for sharing information," said Armstrong
in a statement. "We want people to be armed with the information
that allows them to be independent and in control of their lives
- driving up public service standards through their suggestions
and scrutiny."
