In their review of the use of vote counting machines in the London elections, Open Rights Group (ORG) have thrown a huge spanner in the works:
"There is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared for the May 2008 elections for the mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters' intentions."
The company involved are Indra and The Register reported the very visible issues a while back from their observations at the poll count - not fraud but a lack of transparency.
As well, some of the issues sounded like those experienced during the 'electronic counting fiasco' at the Bedford poll count last year - counting blank ballots as valid votes, jams in the scanning machines and system freezes.
The margin of error ORG thinks there may be would affect some of the declarations for positions in the London Assembly - not the Mayoral vote.
One of the main issues raised by ORG was value for money: is it actually cheaper to do it all by hand? Their three recommendations are:
London Elects should perform a full cost-benefit analysis of e-counting against a properly costed manual count of similar scope.
There should be time for formal consultation at national and local levels before e-counting is used in an election.
There should be long lead-in times, at least 18 months, for the procurement and implementation of election technology.
Postscript: Ella Taylor-Smith posted to the UKIE-EDem list, reminding me of the other botched example of electronic voting and answering the point made by James Gilmour that "because the Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2007 were counted electronically, the Scotland Office has made voting data available at polling district level (subject to a minimum of 200 voters). This has never been done before in the UK. That information is of very great value to the political parties.".
"While the data may well be of value to political parties they don't pay for the elections, which, in the case of Scotland 2007, cost nearly £40 million compared to £17.5 million in 2003. Both were parliament and local government elections."
More on this from The Scotsman, though Ella notes that they "are not unbiased in this matter".
According to the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM:
More and more German citizens use the Internet to performing authorities courses.43 percent of Germans in 2007, electronic services of public administration claimed.
And the UK is slipping down the rankings (p. excuse translation).
Putting a spanner in the gears of the drive to council web ads, Accessible banner adverts, from the RNIB.
Usability will undoubtedly prove to be a key factor in the success of the online channel, particularly when it comes to transactional support for key user services. Compared to last year’s average score of just 45.5%, this year’s sample has performed a lot better against our guidelines. However, there is still significant scope for improvement
Tops for Webcredible? Dan Champion's old stamping ground: Clackmannanshire.
"The business case for accessible technology is compelling. IT that is accessible for disabled people is easier for everyone to use and improves everyone's productivity.
"Indeed, it's estimated that over 60 per cent of the workforce would be more efficient were they to use existing accessibility features."
HMRC chief operating officer Steve Lamey said: "We want to raise the profile of the business case for having a disability competent IT sector, not just to suppliers but to every chief information officer in Europe.
Microsoft is lining up Senior PC for the UK. "The PC will come with simplified software for email, word processing as well as managing prescriptions, finances, travel planning and photographs." Age Concern and Help the Aged are the co-conspirators.
theconnectedrepublic.org is a new community space, developed by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved. They want this to be a user-led, user-dominated space :}
Actually it's Minister Watson. Praise where praise due.
Great primer from Jack Aaronson at ClickZ on new developments in ecommerce producing A Widget World?
Companies like Citibank should hop on this bandwagon and create true mini ATM interfaces that allow users to perform various banking transactions via the iPhone. The iPhone interface would need to operate more like an ATM and less like a Web site (which is how existing online banking tools are designed).
What do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful.
Although people do not generally think of the spy agency as an information-sharing organization, that's an important function of the CIA. And like executives of news organizations, [it's] feeling pressure to make content accessible to an audience that now expects to stay connected from any location.
"People don't always sit at their desks," he said. "If we are really going to be successful, we need to get information to our customers whenever, wherever…by whatever means necessary."
Fowler said the WIRe, which has been online in its current form for less than two years, includes several Web 2.0 tools from text and video to social bookmarks and Really Simple Syndication feeds. "We are really trying to push the envelope," Fowler said.
Content is published seven days a week, and Fowler was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 2007 for his work on the unique, user-driven format of the publication. The WIRe's newspaper-like interface, which reflects editorial decisions about what should go above the fold, is released six times weekly, he said.
In a sense, Fowler added, the product is like a wire service but more scholarly in style. Reports combine field intelligence, open-source information and analysis.
Fowler said the goal is to use various online tools to make the reports more interlinked for the customer, and there's an opportunity for readers to comment on a particular article and follow links to other, related articles.
The collaborative tools "are a means to an end," he said.
Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda's commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network's in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005.
Jakob has been bizzy:
The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.
Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.
More wisdom.
It's unfair to blame Google for the facts of information foraging. The easier it is to get around an information space, the earlier people will leave any one location and surf to the next beckoning hit. That's a fact, and Google is just designing the best product it can.
If we didn't have Google, it would be Yahoo and Live Search that were making us stupid, even though maybe they wouldn't make us quite as stupid, because they would make it a little harder to find the next promising place to go, and thus make people dig a bit deeper at each site.
Also, I have observed the same reading behavior in user research since 1997 (the year before Google was founded) so it's definitely not Google's fault that the very nature of the Web makes users treat individual websites contemptuously. Yes, the behavior is stronger now, with more people that ever using search and diving into sites for very short dips, but fundamentally it's the same style of behavior.
After all, I talked about the importance of designing and writing for search long before Google, and the guidelines are pretty much the same. It's simply become more important to follow them.
The guilty party is not Google, it's the Web.
And, from salesforce.com numbers:
Remember that IE7 was released in October 2006: 20 months ago.
Thus, the UPTAKE SPEED is slightly less than 2% per month (in terms of IE users upgrading from the old version to the new one).
In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
Well it wasn't meant that way but 'the plan' has now been picked up and echoed (this is now a few more echoes than I may have 'planned' for, if I was 'planning'). Jeez, I love the web somedays ...
The original post was a response to Minister Watson's question 'so what should we be doing then?' Some sort of web exchange provoked the question (lost). Literally off the top of my head I thought of ten things. This has now become a 'plan'. Er, Hokay ...
'The 10 point plan'
Findability
Disengagement from the wider web and those damned walled gardens
The site french Rue89.com yesterday which covered the protests in France 3 has posted a video of the President of the Republic "off", before his speech under the presidency of the Union.
In this video aired yesterday via the site Dailymotion, Nicolas Sarkozy is in the hands of technicians and makeup artist from France 3. Faced with him, the director of news and three journalists. The atmosphere is quite tense. She still rises a notch when a technician does not meet the "Hello" Presidential.
The President of the French Republic, nervous, s'offusque then the attitude of the technician, "it's going to change," said he. Further, the president calls the journalist Gerard Leclerc on its placardisation, a few days after the signing by the latter with a forum published in Le Monde, before intimer journalist in the plateau to address the tragedy of Carcassonne.
It will not take more than 24 hours to take the buzz, video displays 316 000 hits on Tuesday afternoon and generating number of comments, particularly on the usefulness of the dissemination of material "In the context of a presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, a politician whose long known he does not hesitate to put pressure on the media, I think it is the information released a video which can be seen interacting with journalists.
It reminds us that tutoye journalists. What he said Gerard Leclerc, a few minutes of an interview, shows that blows hot and cold, "says Augustin Scalbert, Rue89 journalist who had obtained the video and was instantly broadcasts on Dailymotion. For him, the interest of journalistic document and the legitimacy of its availability on the Web would be further strengthened by the context of reform of public broadcasting.
Even his bell side Grevisse Benedict, director of the School of Journalism Louvain, which defends the launch of the video. "A president who has expressed during his tenure, which has twice makes comments who can pass for threats, two direct pressure exerted before the interview. That is, the President, forget that journalists are not in the service of executive power but to public service. As a result, elements of this nature have a clear public interest and must be disclosed. "
Another benefit of the video, for Benedict Grevisse, is that it can be read on several levels, with devastating consequences for the image of the president: "agitated character and manages to control politically, to threats, precise and barely veiled. It will affect lots of people to varying degrees because it talks about lots of things at once, " he says, still media french fairly discreet so far on television the incident.
Information or simple anecdote mounted pin? Approach or very salutary criticism in terms of ethics? François Heynderickx, a professor at the University of Brussels, will not validate about him not journalistic approach. "We're here in a very limit, namely that uses an image taken in a context inappropriate to limit privacy . It seems to me that using images taken in a context which denies that insofar as they reveal new, which justifies their dissemination or we could not prove otherwise.. " Images without real interest other than "find confirmation of what we already know" about the personality of french president concludes François Heynderickx.
Images, especially, who have contributed to establish the reputation of Rue 89, "which is there a way to remind the public attention, and it will be recalled that it was already with a scoop on Sarkozy that the sites It was made known to be î "and who, for Benedict Grevisse, strengthens its position as free media, compared to the traditional information channels in France. Ce n’est donc pas perdu pour tout le monde. This is not lost for everyone.
The new week dawned with even more dramatic news. The USD, trading at over 30 billion to 1 on Friday opened the day at over 60 billion.
As the cash crisis grows, the disparity between the street and the business rates widened as the former relies on the availability of hard cash. When it is in short supply, desperate relatives of economic exiles compete for the ever diminishing ZWD by reducing the price.
As it stands now, no matter the size of the corporation or business, the limit on daily cash withdrawals still remains at ZW $25 Billion, enough to buy 6 fresh eggs!
Likewise, employees do not have enough days in the month to withdraw sufficient cash to pay for their groceries as the financial sector nears collapse.
The OMIR sits at 66 Billion to USD1 and the Hard Boiled Egg Index Fair Value Rate has risen to 28 Billion which is just above the street rate.
Mugabe may literally run out of money - protests have started at the Munich based printers, Giesecke & Devrient, who produce Zimbabwe's money, including, finally, by the German state. Because the trade is a tiny fraction of the company's income, as with Tesco they may well decide to stop the bother and the supply.
Kudos to the Mail though, managing to hit numerous buttons with both 'cute puppy' and 'muslims' in the same headline. A certain kind of evil, McKenzie-ite genius.
Postscript: I actually bothered to post a comment pointing out the difference between 'muslims' and 'muslim'. Not published. Needless to say, the Daily Hate doesn't publish any standards for comments, so no idea which 'term' or 'condition' I may have breached. One for the regulators?
In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”.
The most important change is that we combined TV and Radio in the same iPlayer interface.
Which will be great for introducing a lot of radio comedy to new audiences and entirely appropriate for the viewing circumstance - via computer or via mobile.
There's a stack of other great user-driven new features in it.
In part because Congress has until just a few months ago stood in the way of clean needles for injectors in the city, the capital of the world’s largest economy has HIV rates similar to those in many African countries.
Much web 2.0 isn't accessible but this looks set to rapidly change. Accesify reports that Firefox 3 is "a big accessibility enhancement in the form of WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) support."
I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company’s web site. Let’s not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!
Postcodes are the country’s greatest example of the Power Of Information. I believe we would unlock significant power if we enshrined postcodes as our key national geography, asking Royal Mail to bequeath them to the nation. All statistical and political geography should be aligned with postcodes, with a commitment not to change them for 10 years, perhaps coinciding with the Census cycle. I don’t care if there are marginally more meaningful statistical boundaries; a flawed system we all understand beats a perfect system nobody understands. Oh, and it’s cheaper too.
Dave Briggs issues Three cheers for Dylan Jeffrey, a civil servant who took part in the debate about ICELE by commenting on his blog in Jeffrey's official capacity.
Of course, this week saw the publication of the guidance for civil servants engaging with the social web. Of the five main points, three were: be credible, be responsive and be a civil servant. Dylan hit all three of these.
Let’s hope other civil servants take note, and that Dylan’s colleagues at CLG thank him for doing this on their behalf.
The guidance has been the subject of much justified, excited comment within egov. It's genesis behind the scenes should be noted for some future history of this period. The actual movers here know who they are and deserve, unfortunately anonymous, thanks. The guidance just needs extending now beyond Whitehall!
John Edwards for CIO examines how new text analytics technology is being deployed in the US to examine customer comments on surveys and e-mail as well as monitor blogs, text messages, online chats, phone calls (through speech-to-text conversion) and social network profiles.
For content management products, Halper notes, text analytics can be a complementary technology; for example, text analytics can help categorize or enrich content, analyze content in a data repository, or improve workflow.
Also, vertical industries, such as the legal industry, are becoming increasingly intrigued by text analytics' ability to add insight to an array of routine business tasks, she says.
Today, many text analytics users believe that the technology provides a useful bridge to help nontechnical staff members get a handle on complex problems without running high-level searches.
"You can have business users who are not analysts really understand 'What are my top 10 problems?' or 'How is this issue trending over time?'" Bodoh says.
All new and early days though.
But while text analytics can rapidly generate vast amounts of deep customer insight, the technology is still far away from becoming an out-of-the-box solution.
"For our purposes, in order to get full value from the application, we will have to train analysts to use the software, invest in tuning the taxonomy to produce more granular analyses and integrate the output...with our enterprise data warehouse so we can use the combined data for even greater customer insight."
* I can’t precis Ms Blears’ intro, you need to read it then come back for the rest if you need :) * Bearing in mind that it is based on the GOB Green Paper, you need to know this bit of it: It aims to give citizens the means of participating in decision-making at every level; to clarify the role of Government, both at central and local level; to rebalance power between Parliament and government and give British people a stronger sense of what it means to be British (FWIW: I do not agree with the importance of the second point but hey ho) * This paper is an action plan covering three areas: 1. Widening and deepening empowerment opportunities locally 2. Supporting and enabling people to take up empowerment opportunities 3. Strengthening local representative democracy * In Summer 2008 there will be a review of this action plan, with a further plan set out thereafter (I know, I KNOW… these things take time)
One line which leapt out at me was:
Give citizens a greater role in planning • Build an e-consultation hub: 2007 link every local authority and 2008 open the hub to the general public.
I wonder if this will replace, duplicate or actually means the much-loved, semi-privatised Planning Portal.
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