Monday 17 December 2012

GDS deal death blow to midata

The Government Digital Service (GDS) are currently re-writing all central government websites and moving them to https://www.gov.uk (GOV.UK).

No-one knows why.

Just because the exercise is pointless doesn't mean that it has no effect.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) is a recent victim. The content previously available at http://www.bis.gov.uk should now be available at GOV.UK and browsing old content should redirect you automatically to the new location.

That's the idea.

But it doesn't work with the famous BIS press release A midata future: 10 ways it could shape your choices. That used to be available at http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/consumer-issues/consumer-empowerment/personal-data/midata-future-10-ways-it-could-shape-your-choices. Click on that link now and, however hard you try, you're not going to find the press release, not on GOV.UK, nowhere.

Apart from DMossEsq.com. Luckily there's a copy there, at http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/11/identity-providers-electronic-mary.html So it is still possible to read about the great benefits of midata, BIS's grand plan to satisfy the pent-up demand among the public for a "contracts and warranties dashboard". But no thanks to the butterfingers at GDS.

midata is utterly footling anyway, you may say, depriving it of the oxygen of the BIS publicity machine is neither here nor there.

Quite right, as long as it's only that one press release that's gone missing during GDS's clumsy spring clean.

But is it? What else has gone missing? Maybe something important?

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