mySociety » Blog Archive » What the government doesn’t understand about the Internet, and what to do about it
http://www.mysociety.org/2009/05/29/what-the-government-doesnt-understand-about-the-internet-and-what-to-do-about-it/

Link referenced in #4change chat, 23 July 2009. Interesting blog post on 'why the Internet isn’t like electrification or shipping containers'.

Written in the run-in to the release of the Digital Britain report from a website with a mission to expand the UK's democracy.

Article about how the Government should improve its application of the Internet.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business. This common pattern of more powerful tools for citizens making life harder for traditional institutions is, for me, a cause for celebration. However, I am not celebrating as a libertarian (which I am not) I celebrate it because it marks a historic increase in the freedom of people and groups of people, and a step-change in their ability to determine the direction of their own lives.

Top 5 priorities - a year ago and still valid

The most scary thing about the Internet for your government is not pedophiles, terrorists or viruses, whatever you may have read in the papers. It is the danger of your administration being silently obsoleted by the lightening pace at which the Internet changes expectations.

RT @timoreilly: MySociety's top 5 Internet priorities for government is, as expected, right on. http://bit.ly/ghZl6 [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1330269653]

Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time – to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners. In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.

Map of everything with lots of data being included to make an uber-useful househunting guide