As a request, here’s a totally unofficial translation of the Home Office consultation on internet privacy, and the new laws they hope to put in place to help security and intelligence services access information. Read below or download the PDF. Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu security data Thank you all for your votes on […]
Read more "Home Office consultation on internet privacy"I thought I would explain a bit about the motivation behind Simply Understand, and the questions I hope to resolve through it. There’s more to the story than this, as a lot of my personal motivation comes from how much bright, articulate people struggle to do the basic tasks the government sets for them, which I see every week through some […]
Read more "Why Simply Understand?"Some emotive ones this time, I think, dealing with terrorism, the prison system and protecting children! Please get your vote in, then when I get back from holiday next week I’ll see what I can do with your choice. Voting rights of convicted prisoners detained within the United Kingdom (second consultation) Protecting crowded places Safeguarding Children and Young People who […]
Read more "New poll: vote for your next translation"As well as a bit of revamping (alright, maybe a lot, please tell me what you think!), today I’ve been working on installing a “change monitoring” service on as many central government websites as I could. What does that mean? It means that you can now sign up here, and when one of the central departments, for example […]
Read more "A new way to find out about government consultations"It looks like Parliament (at least a small part of it) is starting to get the ball rolling on improving government language! Not that they swear *all* the time, but as you are all no doubt aware, they really may as well do, for the amount of sense they make. A Parliament Select Committee (that is, a group […]
Read more "Gasp! Shock! Outrage!"No, that’s not a rallying cry to attack the closest politician with a potato masher. Thanks to the people at mysociety and the Guardian tech blog, I stumbled across this site, mash the state, as it was being launched. This is a site that’s campaigning for every local council in the UK to get RSS feeds for their news services. […]
Read more "Mash the state!"I don’t know, you don’t hear anything for nearly a month, then two posts come along at once. There is a new service being pioneered by Reading University which trains civil servants on how to write better documents. It’s called the Simplification Centre, and it offers much more than the usual plain English training! They can teach you […]
Read more "The Simplification Centre"A record number of people voted in this month’s poll, thank you very much! The final winner was the sale and rent back consultation from the Financial Services Authority. Sale and rent back is when you agree to sell your house at a lower price, in return for being allowed to stay on in your house and […]
Read more "Sale and rent back: a translation"