Finding the Grundrisse a bit lightweight for a Friday evening, I thought I might really tax my brain by looking at the websites for the e-government national projects.

I have now filled in at least three separate log-in / registration screens for different sites. Hey, how about single sign on for national projects?

I am puzzled as to the currency of quite a lot of the information as there are no dates; or the latest update is last July.

I am confused by a number of acronyms which don’t seem to be explained in the text.

Quite a lot of information is under review (almost a whole site on one of the projects) or is ‘coming soon’ but how soon is a mystery.

One discussion board ( and there are several) had one post. A good post mind, but no sign it had ever been answered or that there had ever been any others.

One site had a huge list of Word files which I have not bothered to download. Maybe I’ll go back and check the file names just out of interest.

I struggle to be able to say after reading about ‘joined up this’ and ‘joined up that’ and the great effeciencies exactly what the project is about and how it might help the imaginary London Borough of Spitalfields.

Here is a very long url

http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/Home/CouncilandGovernment/Egovernment/Nationalprojects/Pan+London+Project.htm

I don’t mean to pick on anyone but er, isn’t there supposed to be a guideline about urls somewhere?

Or how about the use of ‘click here’? Not a RNIB recommendation if I remember rightly.

One of the project websites doesn’t display properly in Firefox. And the same site has a horizontal scroll bar. I haven’t seen anyone do that for zillions of internet years. How have they managed this??????

Here’s a friendly opening ‘You need to register to view content on this site.’ wot, is this some sort of state secret??? They even want my address!! Help!! And what’s the point? I’ve just registered my address as Planet Zog. It’s not as if it’s doing a postcode look up to check anything.

Meanwhile, I hear the citizens, subjects, public, comrades or whatever classification is in vogue this week, await with bated breathe the final outcomes of all of this…

I am not alone in this uncertainty. To be fair, some of the bulletin boards have long posts from local government staff pointing out long lists of errors they have found. But what exactly is being done to put matters right?