IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Nearly 50% of first-time voters have voted for a Big Brother contestant, but only 40% plan to cast a vote in next month's general election, according to political research firm YouGov. This lack of engagement is certainly not down to a lack of interest: YouGov found that 70% of young people are "very interested" in issues such as taxes, the environment and healthcare. So why can't young voters be persuaded to take part in public elections?

Paul Bettison, leader of Bracknell Forest BC, said SIM (subscriber identity module) cards could replace the chips that are used on smart cards. He predicted this would be the next big step in the development of smart cards for public services.

Whitehall's plans for new technology - and in particular for storing yet more information about citizens - show no sign of slowing down.

Err... both ride roughshod over constitutional matters? Or both rule by autocracy while pretending to act democratically?

I'll leave these for others to debate because the real answer is far more interesting; neither has an e-mail address.

Yet it seemed to happen in Westminster last week, when a House of Commons select committee condemned the government's plan to tax landline users with the aim of raising £1bn to subsidise the build-out of next-generation networks.

The Labour-dominated committee criticised Lord Carter's broadband tax as "regressive". But this wasn't simply an argument about taxation. The committee went further, arguing it could detect "no pent-up demand for super-fast broadband from consumers".

We built it - but will they come? Councils in England have, on average, 79% of their services available electronically. The task now is guide citizens away from traditional contact channels - mail and personal visits - and into the cheaper "e-world".

The Welsh Assembly is considering new initiatives for its ICT transformation programme.

Among the issues it plans to explore are the potential for customer relationship management (CRM) and the use of workflow technologies.

Councils must give serious thought now to how their approaches to eGovernment, e-democracy and working with the private sector fit with their future strategic agenda, says a new Government report ("Fitness for Purpose in the 21st Century: Strategic Choice at Local Level in the New Millennium").

Local authorities have to be totally explicit about what they hope they achieve, says a joint report by the Audit Commission and the Improvement and Development Agency on 4 July.

The famous and often quoted studies into ICT project failures, such as the original 1995 Standish Group CHAOS report and later UK publications by the Public Accounts Committee, the National Audit Office and POST, reiterate the same basic findings: the problems are caused by unclear objectives, poor understanding of requirements, inadequate project management, insufficient user involvement and lack of top management support. All of these "people problems" are very important, to be sure, but far less attention was paid to the problem of project size, tacitly accepting that big is the only way to do public sector ICT.

A new report from The Work Foundation recommends that Net-savvy users should have to use some e-services in order to boost the use and the money-saving benefits of paperless transactions.

In a report published on Monday, the Institute for Public Policy Research said that companies and voluntary sector organisations could provide electronic public services alongside their usual services.