Digital Engagement
Do you want a job as Director of Digital Engagement? The Civil Service is advertising just such a post at the Cabinet Office, but you will need to have a flair for buzzwords.
The job is advertised on the Civil Service online notice board, (a board which rather grandly calls itself the Recruitment Gateway), and has a proposed salary of between £81,600 and £160,000 per annum. So that's where my taxes go. According to the job spec, the successful applicant will "Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government" and "Ensure that digital engagement is always a leading part of Government consultation". If you are left scratching your head wondering exactly what digital engagement actually means once the jargon is stripped away, you will be even more puzzled by the line which reads "Introduce new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as 'jams' into Government".
Jams? If that is a piece of meaningful jargon in the digital age then I haven't heard of it. The fact that even the civil service put it in quotes suggests they don't really know what it means either.
Meanwhile, across the pond, Barack Obama has resisted the pressure to relinquish his Blackberry over concerns that it might be hackable, that it might disclose his location and hence be a security risk, and fears that if it is lost or stolen that it could contain sensitive and confidential material. A political concern is that email records can be subpeonaed by Congress and made public under the Presidential Records Act, which may explain why neither Bush nor Clinton ever used email whilst in the presidency. According to the White House, Obama's Blackberry has been enhanced (presumably by the NSA) to greatly enhance its encryption and thus he becomes the first American president to use email.
21st February 2009