Horizon Digital Economy Research 2011 Open Lecture
A central objective for The University of Nottingham's Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute is
the raising of public awareness of the social, political and ethical issues associated with the
development of the Digital Economy. To help achieve this, Horizon will be holding a series of Open
Lectures. Each lecture will be given by a major national figure in an area related to the Digital
Economy. The aim of the lectures is to explore key issues for the Digital Economy in a deliberately
open and provocative way.
The first lecture in the series will take place at 6pm on Monday 7th March 2011 in The Sir Colin Campbell Building at The University of Nottingham and will be given by Liam Maxwell.
Liam has a close association with the well known Centre for Policy Studies and has been extremely influential in the shaping of much of the Conservative Party's thinking with regard to IT and its role in supporting 'Government as Service'. As the Lead for IT on the Windsor and Maidenhead Council, Liam has overseen the development of new strategies to deliver Council services and to monitor performance. For example, he has encouraged the use of Semantic Web technology and other tools to improve data monitoring and enhance transparency of performance. He has also improved the Council's management of energy through active metering. This data is made available to members of the public. Another initiative has been to use mapping tools as a way for members of the public within the borough to track Council responsiveness to issues raised. These innovations, which all use IT in novel ways, are being closely tracked by the major policy units in Downing Street.
Liam has also recently published a provocative manifesto entitled It’s Ours: why we, not government,must own our data
In this report, Liam argues that the recent history of centralisation in the management and control of individuals’ personal data by government has been a failure. The programme adopted by successive governments is wasteful of resource, creates projects that cannot be delivered, and does not provide the service that we, as citizens, should expect. His remedy is to offer choice and control back to the people whose data it is in the first place. The net result of such a radical policy shift would be to force the use of open standards for information management and so allow easy transfer of information from agency to agency with, if they so require, individual citizens controlling their own repository. Not only would this break the cycle of gargantuan closed public data projects, it would immediately introduce the flexibility, innovativeness and customer-focus to be found in the private sector where this approach is now widespread. Liam’s arguments call for nothing less than the de-nationalisation of our data.
Whilst Liam’s main concern in his Report is with personal data, and freeing personal data for our own use, it is clear that the approach could be more general. Currently, governments collect and hold huge amounts of information about businesses and companies over which those businesses and companies have little or no control and little or no right of scrutiny. Open information for the citizen could well mean open information for business. This raises the issue of how any Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation would need to be shaped and must be of direct concern to all business leaders.Liam Maxwell is a Councillor and the Lead Member for Policy and Performance at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, where his brief includes Information Technology. His background is as an IT Director in Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 business service companies. He is the author of How the Internet took Obama back to the 1950s (Centre for Policy Studies, 2008) and co-author, with Mark Thompson, of Open Source, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government, a report for the Conservative Party, 2008.
RSVP at:https://www.horizon.ac.uk/resources/event-registration.html
Buffet served from 5pm.