It’s been a big week in the world of digital government, what with the first Minister for Communications Stephen Carter announcing that he is in the process of drafting a ‘Digital Britain’ action plan as well as the launch of the Digital Inclusion action plan (I’ll be returning to these in a post shortly). So it seemed rather timely to find myself having a coffee and a chat with the Internet tsar Derek Wyatt MP last Thursday.

While it may be that the Geeks shall inherit the Earth, you will have to forgive me for thinking that government would never be conquered. Arcane IT systems, technophobes as far as the eye can see and one data breach after another, it appeared that there was little hope the government geek looking to rewire the red tape and truly transform government through tech.

But no! The once small and closed community of government techies appears to be growing and opening up with geeks popping up in high places, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Driven in no small part by the appointment of “IT enthusiast and blogging pioneer among MPs” Tom Watson to the role of Cabinet Office Minster for Transformational Government in January 2008, the profile and priority of all thing geeky has rocketed in what has been a pretty tech unsavvy government thus far.

In the blur that was last week, one tweet stood out and woke me from my ambient daze. Possibly after a night of broken sleep brought about by nightmarish images of Dale Winton loading up trolley loads of computers for government supermarket sweep style (or not), Tom Watson (our man in Parliament as Minister for Transformational Government and keen blogger and member of the Twitterati) appeared to start Thursday with a cheery determination to tackle the area of IT procurement in government.

It’s not often events run at 6pm on a Monday appeal enough to get you to give up your evening, but this week I attended (and enjoyed!) an evening run by London’s Regional Improvement Partnership (Capital Ambition) entitled “The Challenge of the Governance of London”.

Set up in early 2006, Capital Ambition is one of nine Regional Improvement Partnerships around the country with the remit of coordinating improvement work across London’s public sector, including the 33 London boroughs, London Councils, the Greater London Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.

No mean feat you might say. However, Capital Ambition and the bodies it supports have seen a number of successes in the last 2 years, with the majority of London’s councils now either said to be improving well or improving strongly according to their regulator the Audit Commission, while similarly London now has only one 1-star rated council (assessed on a 0-4 scale where 0 is poor and 4 is excellent).