At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office.
I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take web-communications more seriously.
Northern Ireland is a particularly testing place for this to be tried. The politics of Our Occupied Six Counties / OUR wee province* are somewhat sclerotic, highly compromised as they are to ensure a continued functioning democracy of any kind as part of the peace-process.
The quality of local government is plainly very poor because even this hamstrung polity has resolved to reform it (there were 26 councils which are being consolidated into 11 by 2011).
Despite this, within one year, Bill helped me get over 40% of the 582 councillors to take their first steps online. Admittedly, this commitment was often a nominal, rather than active one, but prior to the launch of the project, you could count the councillors that had ever unlocked the ‘write’ potential of the web on the fingers of one hand.
A good few real local government stars have emerged in the process, and Bill has taken the (steadfast) resistance of some influential sections of the bureaucracy on the chin and not taken no for an answer.
That’s good news for those of us who want Whitehall to work a bit more effectively. London’s gain will be Belfast’s loss.
*Delete according to binary sectarian outlook
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
