Comments on: Gov 2.0 or circa 1980 http://manwithnoblog.com/2008/05/28/gov-20-or-circa-1980/ Gary Barber rants on user experience, and the controlled chaos of the Web Industry Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:19:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Anon http://manwithnoblog.com/2008/05/28/gov-20-or-circa-1980/comment-page-1/#comment-7893 Anon Thu, 29 May 2008 02:13:31 +0000 http://manwithnoblog.com/?p=181#comment-7893 I am afraid Government 2.0 will not get off the ground as long as government departments keep deferring to the lawyers in their midst for opinions on managing risk. If you are not risk adverse as a lawyer you don't end up working for the government anyway. All the good ones move on very quickly to corporate law somewhere. It would be that sort of lawyers opinion that a request for a reprint is a legal document, or even a contract as it involved money, and therefore needs a signature. As of a couple of years ago the state courts were not accepting electronic signatures (or copies of legislation for that matter) as valid under the Evidence Act. It did matter which magistrate that you got when going to court but any really risk adverse lawyer would cover all bases and insist on paper documents. You can see that that type of thinking flows through to a decision that all transactions have to be paper based. And it would be hard to shift. A bureaucrat when asked to change would just need to point to the written in stone "legal opinion" to justify not changing. It wouldn't matter that times and the law had actually moved on because they would need a second legal opinion to that effect before changing. I am afraid Government 2.0 will not get off the ground as long as government departments keep deferring to the lawyers in their midst for opinions on managing risk. If you are not risk adverse as a lawyer you don’t end up working for the government anyway. All the good ones move on very quickly to corporate law somewhere.

It would be that sort of lawyers opinion that a request for a reprint is a legal document, or even a contract as it involved money, and therefore needs a signature. As of a couple of years ago the state courts were not accepting electronic signatures (or copies of legislation for that matter) as valid under the Evidence Act. It did matter which magistrate that you got when going to court but any really risk adverse lawyer would cover all bases and insist on paper documents.

You can see that that type of thinking flows through to a decision that all transactions have to be paper based. And it would be hard to shift. A bureaucrat when asked to change would just need to point to the written in stone “legal opinion” to justify not changing. It wouldn’t matter that times and the law had actually moved on because they would need a second legal opinion to that effect before changing.

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