1. What’s your name and where are you from?
Tim Woodill. Born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand.
2. What do you do for a living?
I work as a Government technology strategy and change management consultant.
3. Favourite band and/ or artist?
Hard to name one favourite in either category. Bands I like right now include Puscifer, Turin Brakes and Anathema. Favourite artists include Rei Hammon and my new neighbour Johnathan Bingham
4. Android or iPhone?
Android. No question.
5. PC or Mac?
PC – as long as it’s dual booting Windows and Linux.
6. Creature of habit or maverick thinker?
Maverick thinker. I like to think outside the box and find new ways of looking at problems. I also like to challenge my own and other people’s fundamental assumptions.
7. Your house is on fire, what do you save?
The house if at all possible. If not then children, partner and cat.
8. Biscuits – dunk or leave unsullied?
If I have a cuppa and there’s a biscuit involved, I totally dunk.
9. Best project you’ve worked on in Government?
A few years ago, I got to write a technical architecture paper for electronic voting. The paper was one of several that fed into a cabinet paper on the future of voting technology in New Zealand. It was an amazing opportunity to get to grips with the challenges of designing a secure but usable system for digital democracy – and how to avoid the pitfalls and vulnerabilities that have plagued electronic voting systems in the countries where they’ve been implemented. I came to the conclusion that it is totally possible to implement usable systems that securely enable electronic democracy. Public confidence in such systems would be the real challenge though, given the bad publicity that some of the frankly dodgy systems used in the States have received.
10. Where do you hope the field of digital democracy will be in 10 years? Opportunities and pitfalls.
I’m hoping that public consultation tools like Citizen Space and Dialogue will have evolved into a mechanism to effectively crowd-source a lot of the work involved in the development of public policy. I’m hoping that by then we will be able to vote electronically in a verifiably secure manner – and that the debate will be shifting from how such systems can support a representative democracy to how they can support a more participative democracy. The technology by then will not be the barrier. The debate will center around whether the electorate need to be governed, or whether they can be well enough informed to govern themselves. And if you believe the latter, what systems, safeguards and institutions would need to be in place to ensure economic and social stability and the continuity of good governance?
11. Best Gov/ Civic site you’ve seen and why?
I like the UK Government’s digital marketplace. I use it when assessing cloud services for government use. It’s not that it’s a beautifully executed masterpiece of visual design (it isn’t). I like it because it is a key resource for those of us who want to reduce the cost to the taxpayer of providing quality online services to government and citizens.
