All posts tagged: Bureaucracy

UK to unveil ‘Humphrey’ assistant for civil servants with other AI plans to cut bureaucracy

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] A week after the U.K. government announced a sweeping plan to make big investments into AI, it’s laying out more details around how this will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data-sharing deals across siloed departments; and a new set of AI tools — dubbed “Humphrey” after a character on an old U.K. TV political sitcom — to speed up the work of civil servants. The plans will be formally unveiled at a press conference Tuesday headed up by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social Care. Per the U.K. government’s AI site, the projects’ progress appears to be in the very early stages. For example, a plan to bring more AI services into the customer-facing side of the NHS are only at the stage of a “charter” committing to the concept. Other projects include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work to date.  It’s not clear how many …

Far right, far left in European Parliament miss out on millions because of bureaucracy – POLITICO

Published by Sam

[ad_1] “My feeling is that the burden [of paperwork] is really to discourage you,” the person said. Both parties were formed in the wake of June’s European election. Such EU-wide votes always result in a shifting of the political landscape and this time was no exception. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party started the ESN not long after being kicked out of the Identity and Democracy group (ID) because of the extreme views of its leading MEP, Maximilian Krah. After the election, ID fractured into two new far-right groups, Patriots for Europe (home to MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz) and the ESN. Now, AfD is trying to register the ESN as a political party too. Meanwhile on the left, a number of parties, frustrated at how the Party of the European Left operates, jumped ship and started the ELA. In EU-speak, European political parties — sometimes known as Europarties — are associations of like-minded national parties, and their function is to coordinate at the EU level as well as …

Academy commissioners: blooming flowers to ballooning bureaucracy

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Schools Week wasn’t the only new kid on the block in September 2014. To little fanfare, eight regional school commissioners (RSCs) were appointed to oversee academies on behalf of an overwhelmed government. Then academies minister Lord Nash spun the new commissioners – advised by headteacher boards – as the sector’s opportunity to “get control” of the academies system so “your future is in your hands and not some local bureaucracy”. But ten years later, that control has gone full circle – mirroring a similar shift across academies too. How did that happen? What can we learn? Schools Week chronicles the rise of the regional school commissioners… Regulatory turf war Tory education secretary Michael Gove put the rocket booster under New Labour’s academies programme after he took over in 2010.Alongside academising failing schools, he opened up the route for all ‘good’ or better schools. There were 200 academies educating 192,000 pupils in 2010; by January 2015 that had grown to 5,000 academies educating 2.7 million pupils. Sam Freedman It was an “unexpected and … unmanageable …

The Modern World’s Bureaucracy Problem

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] The modern world has a bureaucracy problem. We’ve known this since the post-Cold War years, as words like “paperwork” started popping up in media and conversation and a spate of anti-bureaucratic books like The Peter Principle, The Bureaucratization of the World, and Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them hit bookshelves. In other words, we’ve recognized that bureaucracy is annoying, soul-killing, and worthy of scorn and derision for decades. Apparently, we just can’t do anything about it. The world is more bureaucratic today than ever. We’re going backwards. I’ll admit, I wasn’t planning on writing about bureaucracy. How boring. I try to, essentially, duck and cover. Hide from it. You need a spy-like furtive footprint, a feel for staying unentangled. Slip away sight unseen. No such luck. The States greeted my return from Europe with news that my bank info had been compromised (in one of these periodic drone-like non-admissions of responsibility — didn’t someone break into your computer systems? — advising everyone to change their passwords). I didn’t think anything of it, it’s sort of like those Amber alerts you get, …