Digital Britain opts for man with red flag walking in front?

I first saw the news of its release on the Amplified 09 Blog: (been editing some web video of a Future of the Broadband Web strategy presentation we're doing, ironically enough...)

In a Guardian article today, there was a call for social media commentator, Clay Shirky to either write or assist in writing the final Digital Britain report*. The reason given for this request is that the Steering Committee behind the interim report, released yesterday, is made up of too many journalists, policy wonks and QuaNGO representatives, and too few people who actually know what is going on out there in business and technology land.

Heck, why stop at one Shirky's latest book "Here comes Everybody" sees exactly the same new world as Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur - but to Shirky the digital cup runneth over, to Keen it has a darn great hole in the bottom. Charles Leadbetter's "We Think" steers between these two worldviews.

Realistically, its the Koreans and Japanese who are pushing this technology to the current limits, that's who we really need to get here to advise us. Also, its the Scandinavians and French in Europe who are ahead - the Americans are not much further ahead (if at all) than we are. They just get better press coverage

And why use Americans anyway - what about using qualified Brits in the space - after all, Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the bloody Web and BT patented something like a Browser years before the Internet even existed - and the UK punches way above its weight in every type of media, digital or otherwise, that you can imagine. I've never seen anything come out of Silicon Valley that I haven't seen in some form in a BBC or BT or some UK university research lab before (Geeks around the planet think of things at roughly the same time, and everyone is so interlinked that a thought Twittered in California is read in London seconds later).

As the Amplified blog notes:

But we weren’t asked to contribute prior to the publishing of the Interim Report at all. And where we have been asked to respond - as all British residents and citizens have been given the option to respond - it is in writing to the Digital Britain team, or by participating in TED-style Digital Britain summit events across the UK in April and May.

Well, no one asked us either, and we've been specialising in this stuff for years - and no one has asked any of the other small skilled digital media consultancies I know of either, the people who live and breathe this stuff? Who have they been talking to in the UK, one wonders? Certainly no one I can pick up who is blogging that I can see. This just shows a collective lack of confidence by the Digital Britain team in the skills and ability of its own countrymen.

I have an idea - let's use this newfangled Web thingy to get people's views and comments, maybe even set up some social media sites to aggregate it, some forums and wikis to collaborate etc etc. Hey, maybe I'll write a blog post to start!

* Charles Arthur, who wrote the Guardian report, called the Digital Britain report "porridge". I scanned it this evening, initial impression is that I just think its off the pace, its describing the digital world c 4-5 years ago, seems a bit corporate, and appears to be taking very few of the lessons from Korea and the more advanced countries on board, nor from the people who are pushing the Web. If this is the future of the British information superhighway, I'm worried that they want to put a man with a red flag walking in front of the traffic, as another committee of worthies decided to do for motor cars in their early days. BoingBoing was far ruder:

"Digital Britain report proposes to save Britain's future by destroying the Internet"

I'll do a more complete analysis this weekend.