MiramarMike: Blog

When those that are thinking about online voting in New Zealand can answer these simple and well articulated points made by Tom Scott then we can talk about it, until then let's not kid ourselves or try and dupe the general population.

Over the past few weeks I have taken the time (and you do need to take time) to spring clean my online footprint as far as I can - here's what I did. First of all I changed my main Google passwords - I have 2 accounts, a work one and a personal one (which feeds in my "spam" account, you know the one you use to sign up for shit you're not sure you'll ever actually use, the one that if all hell was unleashed upon it you'd merely delete it and create a new one, you have one of those, of course). Whilst my personal account's password changes fairly regularly as that's where the stuff I care about is saved (photos and contacts) my work one has been languishing with a strong but very old password - eek. Changing a password is weird - you do it easily enough but then there's a good week or so of having to retrain muscle memory when using it. I discovered there are two memories though, the laptop keyboard memory and the phone memory - keep plugging awa

If you know any the following hashtags (I'll link to Twitter use) #rulesascode , #betterrules , or  #legislationascode  then you'll have a rough idea as to what I'm going to write about. Let's assume though that you have never seen them before, and if you're inside New Zealand that's high likely even though this started as Kiwi government concept - " world famous outside of New Zealand ", I paraphrase one of the Better Rules front runners, Nadia Webster . So what is it - I think this, from the online discussion hosted by the New Zealand government's Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) is a great start: The models of creating, managing, using and improving the "rules" of government (policy, legislation, regulation and business rules) are traditionally developed for use in a non-digital - paper - environment. In an ever increasing digital world this creates inefficiencies and also can impact on the effectiveness of policies - i.e. t

Not so long ago I was thrown the line, "Ah, but you're for ever the tech optimist Mike", and I believe is was meant as a put down, or at least a means of trying to keep me quiet. It failed. It is true that I have grown up (I'm 52 years young) with computers and seen their magic* transform lives, from my own through friends and family to the wider Western society in ways that are truly remarkable. I still express childlike wonder at how these boxes of wires (I know, I know), that are mostly air, can, when they are put into the hands of astoundingly clever humans, produce tools that add joy and knowledge to my life. Take these boxes, connect them with light wires so they can share the bits and bytes, whilst also sticking as many of them as you can into a warehouse and you have the means to share the joy and knowledge to every person on this planet. Stick the means to access these magic warehouses to a small slab of glass that can do it's own magic a

I've been asked to attend a number of city council* run workshops over the year's I've been a grey haired fella. Each one has had great intentions, a myriad of agendas, and an attendance by the great and the good of Wellington. Sometimes I have looked around and wondered, "How much would it cost to get this consultation if the attendees charged their normal hourly work rate?" A lot, a massive amount of lot, is usually my internal answer. And yet, nothing has ever come of these events. I have never had any follow up on what happened with the ideas, the viewpoints, the big expensive brains. It's almost always an exercise in, "How to piss off some seemingly important and honoured people". The worst sort of  consultation . A room of brains * central government is almost as bad, but they do tend to provide at least a summary and one following update