It's good to see central government catching-up with the Thatcham Vision Project. It has just launched it's very own 'wiki' - click here to take a look at it and here to look at ours which we set-up two months ago. A great idea, obviously, and there are some interesting links on the home page including one to the excellent IDeA website, which is about innovation in local government.
I'd like to offer a small suggestion to the Whitehall wikiers. Try to wean yourself off the jargon guys. This is a personal thing – I’ve written about it on this blog before - but I really do have a pathological dislike of management jargon. For instance, the following leaped off the home page and tried to strangle me:
'key competency' - translation: something really important we need to be good at
'embed innovative thinking within local government' - translation: ensure councils get better at improving things
‘joined-up working’ – translation: well that one needs a whole new blog entry of its own, but I guess that it’s a more 'muscular' (ugh!) version of ‘joined-up thinking’, another phrase which has been bandied about a lot over the last few years.
The quote from the usually lucid Peter Drucker is particularly impenetrable: if anyone can work out what it means do drop me a line via this email address.But hey, it’s easy to criticise. Innovation is a subject which fascinates me and I’ll try to find some (of my own) time to explore and add-to the ‘e-innovations’ (oh dear!) wiki. You might like to do that as well because the whole point of a wiki is that it’s a two way thing: wikis are websites you can both read and write yourself.
Incidentally, the world's most famous wiki was in the news yesterday.
