Daily View 2×2: 12 November 2009

Good morning. Today in 1990, Tim Berners Lee published a formal proposal for the world wide web. Today nearly twenty years later, here we all are. And isn’t it frightening that 1990 is nearly twenty years ago?!

2 Big Stories

Labour’s plan for ‘John Lewis’ public services

The Guardian is reporting that the Labour party are proposing mutualising public bodies – and the Guardian thinks the concept of mutualisation will be so alien to its readers that the only way of explaining it is by analogy to John Lewis.

Hospitals and schools would be transformed into John Lewis-style partnerships under radical plans that could form a central plank of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Public sector bodies, which would also include leisure centres, housing organisations and social care providers, would be allowed to take control of their own affairs if staff and users voted in favour.

Quite an amazing change of fortune from the party that has spent the last dozen years increasing Whitehall control over – well, pretty much everything.

Valerie Singleton launches six-button computer to get elderly online

The Telegraph has the story.

The screens of new PCs have just six buttons, allowing technology-shy users to surf the internet, send emails and watch videos without having to navigate around cluttered desktops.

My immediate facetious flippant thought is that receiving email from elderly people who have keyboards with only six buttons might well be a frustrating experience for all concerned. Which 20 letters will they omit?

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

  • Scrutinising Scrutiny
  • John Ault has news of a Tory council about to disappear up its own fundament:

    Conservative controlled Wealden District Council, has ‘set up a scrutiny panel to scrutinise its scrutiny panels.’

  • Is this available in English?
  • Alex Folkes highlights an unreadable high level strategic document from new Cornwall Council. Not in Cornish, but in management jargon.

    At Cabinet today, member queued up to complain about it and wrung an admission from the Leader that it needed to be ‘in plain English and fit for purpose’. Cabinet Member Carolyn Rule agreed to go away and proof-read it. I hope that she goes further and gets it re-written in English.

    Don’t miss p23!

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

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4 Comments

  • David Heigham 12th Nov '09 - 3:23pm

    Some of us elderly have been swearing at computers for 50 years. Anything, any little thing at all that makes them easier to use and/or more reliable and/or less frustrating is always welcome.

    Some of us also recall the many mutuals, municpals and trustee institutions that got nationalised after 1945. Nobody, at the time ever gave a satisfactory account of the why of those nationalistions. “But they will be more efficient, of course..” was the best that I encountered. In none of the cases that I am aware of has that turned out to be true.

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