Some IT requirements

Spent today at a library project board meeting in Edinburgh... well, 3 hours of today, and the rest waiting for Easyjet and trains. So (as well as some 'proper' work) I set up a meeting with Simon Berlin (Head of IT) for Thursday to start discussing how the council can start properly resourcing IT for councillors to use effectively. Also spotted confusing words in the draft of our ward surgery leaflet (so had Susan), and corrected them. (Our first surgery session at St Georges is arranged for this Saturday).

I collected my standard-issue councillors' laptop on Monday evening, before an unremarkable Labour Group meeting. They're not-bad Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook tablet PCs, which is nice for paperless reading; but just as big and heavy as my LSE Dell laptop - without the extra security of requiring a smartcard as well as password; which is ironic as the Fujitsu IT support guys seem overly concerned about security of access, but without really understanding what they're protecting, or where the loopholes might be. So the laptops are 'locked-down' without any administrator priviledges, and the council VPN does things like filtering URLs with Chinese-like ruthlessness - including lewisham.org.uk which doesn't appear to exist from a Lewisham Council web browser! Well, I suppose that will stop them ever seeing this!

Ordered a copy of the Caseworker software package from CFL, which of course I can't officially install on Lewisham's laptop. Think I'll manage, somehow...

The IT needs of councillors (which I'll discuss with Simon) must include having proper network access from all the town hall rooms in which we have meetings, so we can be relatively paperless. Astoundingly this is "less than straightforward", and there seems (after a bit of scanning with my XDA) to be a mess of different wi-fi coverage there, with a subscribed BTConnect service dominating the council-installed network; and lots of holes in coverage. They've had over 5 years since I must have started pressing for this, but I've promised to wait until Thursday to find out why.

Got another interesting case (as email) too, on which more later.