I’ve been a bit remiss in my policy blogging lately. This tends to happen when you’ve been pushing a rock up a hill for years and one day, out of …
Today Open Rights Group has released a thorough response to the government’s consultation on the Investigatory Powers Act Codes of Practice. They draw particular attention to the process itself, which …
Read moreParliamentary sovereignty is being bypassed, and digital is in the middle.
Today Theresa May has pulled the trigger to begin the process of withdrawing the UK from the European Union. (This is likely to lead to Scottish independence and the reunification …
Read moreBrexit for geeks: a briefing for digital professionals
Last week I was chatting with some rather cracking professional digital rights activists. The conversation included my attempt to get them, from their London/English perspective, to understand the different cultural …
Read moreNamed Persons II: Scotland’s next mass civilian database
Parliament carried on as usual today. Parliament carried on because the people of this country had questions that needed answers. In Parliament’s first hour of business on the morning after, …
And that’s how I got here. https://heropress.com/essays/going-back-roots/
Last month I spoke to a cracking audience at a Highland Fling Session in Glasgow on the subject of “Professionalism in Software Development” and, by extension, all things digital. My …
Read moreIn Scotland, we are angry. We are organising. We are professionalising.
On 28 February the UK Government published its Government Digital Strategy. (A mea culpa first. I had confused the Government Transformation Strategy, the internal blueprint for Whitehall digital, with the …
Read moreThe UK Government Digital Strategy is out, and it’s rubbish
And so we had the government’s Brexit white paper, a document so vapid that it inspired my MP to tweet that it reminded her of a high school student stretching …
Read moreThe Brexit white paper on digital: a very short post
There were some intriguing developments announced regarding the UK’s Brexit negotiations and the Digital Single Market strategy on Friday the 20th of January. I can’t imagine why we all missed …
Read moreA fresh round of government evasions on digital, Brexit, and the Digital Single Market
In January 2016 these were the digital law issues on my mind: VATMOSS GDPR Accessibility law dramas These are the digital law issues I am worried about one year later: …
I genuinely cannot believe I am typing this: here is the final text of the Section 508 refresh (PDF, 127 pages, 1.14 mb). The ruling was approved by the US …
Important update This post was written in January 2017, when it appeared the reform was heading towards a tidy conclusion. That did not turn out to be the case. As …
The draft European Accessibility Act would harmonise technical standards and accessibility requirements for hardware and physical systems across Europe.
Web sites and apps of public sector bodies within Europe must come into compliance with these accessibility requirements.
Today the European Commission has announced a raft of proposed reforms to the VATMOSS system.
IWDRO, a private for-profit business under peculiar ownership, has illegally claimed to be the official regulator of the web design and development fields.
A Parliamentary hearing into Brexit’s impact on the organised digital professions provided valuable lessons for the unorganised web industry to follow.
Labour has released 170 questions for the government concerning Brexit and policy. Here are their questions regarding digital and the tech industry.
From Hansard: Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his statement today. In particular, I liked the section in which he said that he …
Read moreEverything said about digital in yesterday’s Brexit statement
In this week’s column for AccountingWeb I rode my favourite hobby horse: the exclusion of the digital economy from UK official statistics due to woefully outdated taxonomies. Previous rants are …
One of the many questions left unanswered in the face of Brexit is the future of the UK within the EU’s Digital Single Market (DSM).
There was a bit of chatter yesterday regarding yet another dubious outfit, promoting itself as an “official” web design and development industry body, phoning around looking for membership signups. This …
Read moreSeriously. Don’t join a fake web industry body to get a membership badge. Here’s why.
Over at the PowerMapper blog I’ve explored both sides of a great debate: should screen readers be detectable in analytics? It’s an issue that pits accessibility against privacy, with legal …
At long last, the UK Government has acknowledged the absurd undercounting of the digital economy in UK economic statistics.
For an entire site on digital legislation and Brexit, please visit my side blog at https://afterbrexit.tech. As the referendum on EU membership approaches on 23 June I find myself being …
I delivered this presentation on 21 May 2016 at J and Beyond in Barcelona, Spain. It covers what VATMOSS is, where it came from, what problems happened before and after …
Public sector web sites across Europe will be transformed in the years to come thanks to an improved, revamped, and rather superb EU web accessibility directive.
The children of Dunblane were being watched. The predator knew their names, their faces, and their personalities. They knew who the children’s friends were, where they played together, and what …
I wrote for Smashing Magazine: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/03/location-data-web-development-and-the-law/