David Cameron has unveiled his plan to bring Westminster and the devolved governments of the UK closer together: a Council of the Nations. It is a breathtakingly original idea, groundbreakingly original in its originality. We've never heard anything like it before, it's so gosh darn original. Yes, this is a truly original idea. Why has nobody ever thought of it before? The mind boggles.

Not my original idea: 1. We all have either a device attached to the tele or we use the Black Berry or we use our mobile and our National Insurance number gives us ID which enables us to vote at any time on a number of legislative proposals. 2. All the pollies have been sacked, political parties disbanded and the civil service trimmed down to its new executive function of feeding proposals in and ...

Mike Rouse is back. After a break Mike will be continuing coverage of technology in the service of politics. He starts with some reflection on fashion, technology and finance. As a designer and developer in the political arena I have noticed a sudden spike in interest in web technologies in the past few months. All of a sudden politicians from all areas of the spectrum are talking about Twitter, F...

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has unveiled three major new innovation clusters focusing on climate, energy and information technology. Each of the initiatives will bring together academia and industry at several locations across Europe.

Two Birmingham area public service bodies have invested in Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape technology to implement advanced enterprise-wide communications infrastructures, producing enhanced service capabilities and reducing cost of ownership.

Coventry University has chosen MidlandHR’s integrated HR and payroll solution iTrent, to upgrade its HR and payroll operations. iTrent will bring together data from the University’s 2,800 employees, based in the centre of Coventry, providing key benefits such as self service and web recruitment.

Did anyone, except for the Metropolitan police, the lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service that authorised the original charge, 10 members of the original jury, and the judges that rejected his first appeal believe that Barry George was guilty of the murder of Jill Dando? Perhaps a better question now would be how many of those aforementioned organisations and individuals still believe that Barr...

Jo Swinson argues parliamentarians need to do more than just pay lip service to online voter engagement. Not least harnessing the possibilities of digital campaigning “MPs are talking, not hearing, online” was the BBC News headline last week about a Hansard Society report into how MPs are using new technology to connect with the public. In fairness, some MPs have embraced new technology and...

Since the problems with Have Your Say first arose last week, we have been doing everything we can to identity the causes and bring the service back online. Sadly, despite these efforts we are not yet in a position to say with certainty what caused the downtime. As such, we have now decided that the priority is to bring Have Your Say back online as quickly as we can, even if this means offering a s...

It is very easy to look at this technology and be dismissive... but that our weakness isn't it? We are a technology society and look at the specifics of technology to form the basis for our judgments. It a technology doesn't conform to our conceptual expectations regarding capability, then 'it doesn't pass the smell test' and is usually dismissed with sarcasm. I expect the...