Recent UK government policies, consultations, and controversies related to digital and tech. For insight into UK tech policy throughout the Brexit process, visit my side blog at https://afterbrexit.tech.
Some personal news: I’m absolutely delighted to be joining Open Rights Group, the UK’s fearless digital rights organisation, as their Policy and Scottish Campaigns Officer.
A musing on the Piglet’s Code and the Online Farms Framework.
I was honoured to be asked to write this report on the UK Tech Cluster Group’s Recovery Roadmap summit, ably supported by the UKTCG leadership team, showcasing their policy recommendations to support the tech sector’s role in the post-COVID recovery.
Several years of watching Parliamentary hearings, participating in the shaping of legislation, and observing the politicisation of the fundamental rules of the open web have proven the old axiom: if you regulate the web as if only Facebook and Google exist, the end result will be that only Facebook and Google exist.
Let’s talk about democracy, and technology, and how sausages are made.
I was delighted to contribute to The Entrepreneurs Network and Coadec’s joint 2019 General Election manifesto, where we set forth our policy ideas for the next government. My contributions, as always, were around internet regulation.
Something distressing happened this week in the Commons chamber, and the Prime Minister wasn’t even there.
I didn’t think we’d be here, but here we are. In my capacity as a Policy Fellow at COADEC, the tech policy body for the UK’s tech startups, I have written a plain-English guide for tech and digital businesses to use to prepare for a No Deal Brexit. While the guidance is aimed at startups and scaleups, the advice is applicable to all tech businesses regardless of where they are on their journey.
Don’t you love it when a policymaker resigns their post and you can hit publish on an old draft, which is very much my personal thoughts not in a professional … Read more
Updated May 2020.
Last month I worked with Coadec, the policy voice of Britain’s tech startups, to lead on the formulation of their response to the ICO’s draft Age Appropriate Design Code. I wrote this draft document as a roadmap for the work, although what follows here are very much my own personal thoughts, not Coadec’s.
I wrote for PublicTechnology about the Minister for Health exploiting technology fears to run roughshod over consultative democracy and the rule of law.
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 more
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 more
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.