It’s not perfect, though, and as usual, it’s the human element that’s problematic. It’s the responses to petitions that don’t hit the mark, and don’t give any opportunity for people to engage further. It’s the top-down, message-driven, one-way broadcasting at people, instead of the collaborative, mutually respectful conversation that we should be having with Government.

Having real, two-way conversations is hard. It requires time, patience, money, and a wholesale change in attitude — but Government say they’re up for it. Digital Engagement is the mantra du jour. And things are definitely moving in the right direction.

So — given this background of steady and positive change — why are Number 10 still stuck in the mud? Why do we get responses to petitions that range from the dishonest to the obtuse, and only the occasional gem, when it really should be the other way around?

And why, when someone makes an extremely sensible suggestion for a way to make this a bit better, does it get dismissed out of hand?

All who are currently procuring e-petition software should beware: it’ll be an expensive waste of time unless you use it to substantively engage with citizens.

The last thing the Web needs is another place for people to shout into a hole.

Wondering what on earth it could possibly mean, I tweeted for some ideas:

Delightful graph fail from gov IT strat. What, I wonder, is 90% sophistication!?

And, well — people had some excellent ideas:

90% of Brits wear smoking jackets while they browse the web. Exmosis

It’s when your little finger sticks out while typing LilianBarton

Whatever it was, it seems to have stopped in 2007, so maybe we can relax. Or assume we must now be at at least 106.74%. pubstrat

Doesn’t matter – we’re kicking Europe’s ass by a whole 14%!! Yay us!! simond

All my answers are just too smutty to tweet paul_clarke

Got a good one? Add it in the comments…

The mind boggles. I think Henry Porter summed it up nicely:

“This is a fundamental breach of rights, but almost as serious is the offence to common sense”

Who are the people who make this kind of decision, and why are they so paranoid? Wouldn’t it be better if people with these responsibilities assessed the risks that we all face reasonably and rationally?

This kind of petty officiousness deserves no mercy. Mass civil disobedience is called for. I hope that these adventure playgrounds are inundated with an unstoppable horde of parents and grandparents, bearing picnics, toys, and healthy bullshit detectors.

Someone’s got to make sure the kids know that we’re really screwing these things up.

The site offers a free API to convert postcodes into latitude and longitude coordinates. This is an important thing to be able to do: the postcode is a de facto standard for specifying locations on the web. Any site that needs to know your location will ask for your postcode — from mapping, to political engagement, to useful local services.

Unfortunately, the Royal Mail owns the postcode database, and maintains a stranglehold on it. They won’t let you use it for a website unless you pay them exorbitant fees (£1000+). This might be ok if you’re a big company, but lots of the most useful services aren’t. Those people have no choice but to use whatever data they can find on the web — something which, among other things, is very inconvenient. We decided to make it easier, and take that step out of the process. We do the tricky bit — sniffing the data out from the corners of the web — and pass it back to as structured information that developers can use to create sites that make people’s lives easier and better.

The site’s been up for nearly a month, and it’s been busy. Already, three libraries have been donated by volunteers — with no prompting — that make it much easier to submit requests using PHP, Perl or Ruby.  Scores of people have sent us messages of support. I’ve even been hugged. We’ve been written about by Guardian Tech and FreeOurData. The site has served lots and lots of requests to people doing useful things.

We’re delighted that it’s going so well, but we have big ambitions — so please help spread the word. We’d love to see lots of useful services using the site. The more people who do, the more irrefutable our argument will be when it comes time to persuade Government and the Royal Mail that the status quo just won’t do.

So please, blog about ErnestMarples.com. Tell your friends, colleagues, cats and dogs. Send tweets pinging round the world. We need all the help we can get.

Because I had unusual plans — buying a Pay & Go phone and then switching to a 1-month rolling contract — I rang O2 twice before buying anything. I wanted to make sure that Visual Voicemail, unlimited wifi and tethering would work on a non-iPhone contract, and was assured that they would be.

After getting the phone, I found that Visual Voicemail didn’t work, and called O2, assuming it was a configuration problem… but no. They said Visual Voicemail and tethering are unavailable on anything other than an iPhone contract, which is not what they said before. I suggested some possible solutions to this:

Could you turn on these features without using an iPhone contract? Answer: No. Apparently it’s “technically impossible”.

Could you put me on an iPhone contract with an appropriate discount and no minimum term (since I already have the phone) Answer: No. “The system won’t let me do that.” — “Can I speak to someone who can authorise it?” — “No one could authorise that” — “What!?”

I had a bit of a go at the guy and was called back by a manager, who offered me a month’s free line rental to make up for it, but still. I felt pretty messed around, especially since i had taken so much care to ensure that everything would be ok. Ho hum.

In any case, I do now have the new iPhone, and it’s lovely (despite O2′s crummy 3G coverage), and I’m terribly happy with it. It is an awesome piece of kit: so awesome, it turns out, that it can even balance out the monumental crapness of mobile phone companies.

If only it was available to Orange customers…

Edited to add:

I forgot to mention that O2 were pretty rubbish even before I got my hands on the phone. I ordered it online on the Friday morning when it was released. The website asked me when I wanted when I wanted it to be delivered, so I picked a free slot on Monday morning. It didn’t arrive. My card was billed — all, I thought, was good. I rang O2, and they said it would arrive in the next couple of days.

On Tuesday, perhaps over-enthusiastically, I rang O2 again to ask when it would come, only to be told that they’d run out of stock and cancelled the order.

Beyond the initial confirmation email, I didn’t hear from them at all. They didn’t tell me a thing. #Fail.

I’ve just read Alan Johnson’s article at Comment Is Free. Other than to say that it’s the same old Home Office nonsense, I shan’t deconstruct it further – Longrider has already done that with characteristic style. What I’m more interested in is the sentiment expressed by Johnson’s headline: “We need Identity Cards, and soon”. While it is wrong, it does hint at a real problem, and one which has not been convincingly solved.

It’s difficult to interact with Government properly on the Internet. Public services should all be available online, but attempts to put them there are often stymied by the absence of good ways to identify and authenticate people. It’s important that we fix this problem. Interacting with bureaucracy electronically has clear benefits: it’s fast and convenient, it permits services to be customised and interlinked, it makes it easier to help people who are confused, it simplifies data collection and significantly reduces cost. These are real, substantive benefits.

An so, we have Identity Cards, which — among other reasons — the government is introducing in order to make these changes possible. Unfortunately,  ID Cards are a deeply inappropriate solution. They miss the point so severely that it would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. The main mistake made by the benighted scheme is to assume — more or less blindly — that a proof of identity is actually what’s required.

What organisations really need to know is not who you are, but what you are authorised to do or have, and whether you are a person they already know. They need to understand what they should and shouldn’t give you, and they need their relationships with people to be consistent: whether you’re called Bill or Bob couldn’t matter less, but if you’re Bill and you’re now just calling yourself Bob, that’s important for organisations to realise.

What’s needed is not a card. It’s not a gigantic database cataloguing every conceivable fact about all of us. It’s not an authoritarian state insisting that you must identify yourself on demand. Government assumes that it should control the tools that we use to identify ourselves, but that attitude is what’s got us into the situation we’re now in: where impersonal juggernauts of institutions are incapable of interacting with us efficiently and empathetically. Where we strive to avoid contact with them and always take the shortest route out of any interactions we have to have, because they feel like wading through treacle.

What’s needed is a way for organisations to interact with us where we control our own data, releasing it to those we trust, and revoking it when relationships break down. Where we can selectively provide the information that organisations need. To have privacy and respect from a system that currently treats people rather badly: as a number, as the sum total of their customer record and credit rating, as a threat presenting a risk to be managed. A system, in other words, that allows organisations to get the assurances they need without sacrificing our dignity.

The ID cards scheme is not this system, and we must fight the good fight — but let’s not let be blinded by it. We mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Fantastic things could be made if a respectful and effective authentication scheme were to exist — so perhaps, despite Johnson’s article being the same old Home Office balderdash, there was an iota of truth in his headline.