Hey-Ho

Today was one of those that didn’t go as planned.

A planned meeting at Newham Town Hall fell-through because of sickness, so I worked there on correspondence, before driving to Stratford for a network infrastructure update meeting, over lunch, with Richard Carde and Greenwich’s Henri Reinbolt.

After lunch I met with James Lee for an update on PSMP and associated network issues. We are up to 10,000 unique users on the Newham PSMP, which will include the TfL Journey Planner from next Monday.

A planned Teleconference with a BCS colleague did not materialise, and dinner with a Microsoft colleague was cancelled because of sickness. However, I stayed in town, and met-up with Adrian Hancock, David Houston and John Serle. We had dinner at Busaba Eathai, and discussed Socitm and continuing challenges before us.

Ian Dunmore, from Public Sector Forums, called me yesterday to let me know he had lodged a Freedom of Information query with the Central Office of Information, asking questions such as the grounds for granting Socitm its .gov domain name and, sure enough, we heard, today, from the COI that the request was received. That’s an irritation that we could well do without at this time, but hey-ho.


The OGC has now launched tools that are aimed at improving the chances of ICT procurement success. Its “pre-qualification” tool is for internal use – the sort of thing you would expect to see in a business case before getting the go-ahead to start procurement.

Also, the Information Commissioner’s Office launched a model publication scheme. This is the link for the scheme applying to “principal” Local Authorities.