So, sniping from the sidelines, whilst fun, is not constructive nor man in the arena valuable so, in a debate with just myself, here is my five point plan for what my tax money should be wasted on

1. TechCityUK seems to have the usual, born out of a politicians excitement, mission to "bring together and ignite a spark". Now in our hyper connected, social media addicted, Meetup fueled entrepreneur scene, a government agency to bring us together is just laughable. As a case in point I have now been to I think three events at techCity and not one did I go to because of techCity - two were meetup.com and one was the GDS mailing list. Now perhaps they have great office space really cheap (it is a nice office slap bang in (expensive!) central London) but as I am supposed to go to a bootstrap business Meetup tonight above a pub in Kings X (Google Charlie Irish and apologise from me I might not make it as usual), as they manage without government subsidies I suspect the role techCity has is ... Redundant to the max.

2. Immigration. Oh let's get involved in that quagmire. I have actually sued the Home Office (back when we had a Home Office) to get a coder back in the country. Worked for us for 18 months then told to fuck off, we can find a Brit to do the job. Turned out we couldn't.

So here is my immigration suggestion. If I have a foreign coder working for me, and you tell her to fuck off out the country, you can either pay me compensation while I go find another British worker, and train them up, or you can fund her for six months in ForeignLand while she sets up a home office.

In short if you don't want foreign workers in our country dear government, paying taxes and doing value added work, then you can fund the difference between why, for heavens sake, I cannot find a British born coder for love nor money and why there are dozens of East Europeans with Maths degrees out of their bottoms wandering around London.

I may not have a coherent view there but I am definitely blaming government for it.

3. Open Source and procurement. Ok this is a bit of my own bugbear (http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto) but the CCS/GDS hub is doing a fine job, and needs to be cloned and passed around local and regional and the rest of central government. Whilst there may be difficulties with actual cloning, expanding their team and remit is more viable.

So firstly we need to make open source the default for all new government software development (it's more or less there). Then the default for existing services - this is fundamentally because we are now having our government run by software and like our laws we should be able to read it. It also means there will be massive massive opportunity to funnel the huge government spend out to an Eco-system of smaller developer communities who will do what TechcityUK cannot dream of.

And before or as part of that, we need to introduce acorn-like OSS projects - take expert civil servants, give them good project managers and funding and get them to seed OSS projects, hackathons, OJEU announcements, whatever. Start a project on GitHub, because the people we want to attract to working on government projects are not the kind of people who will do an RFT first.

4. Move it out of the South East. I have spent 40 years here on and off. It's not nice, it's just powering along. But it's sucking the rest of the country dry. Take those techCity funds, and rent out corrotated iron sheds in country lanes all over the land, and hand them to young idiots with an idea. And give them train passes to travel down to London to go to Charlie Irish's meetups to meet old idiots.

Have the gumption to directly fund and support young people with a vague idea that starting a business is a good thing. Have them attached to idiots like me who will ask difficult questions every month or six weeks and just accept that 90% will show no return - expect for the best return of trained experienced entrepreneurs.

5. There is far more in the scope of government paying for software from a vibrant community of open developers. How to marry that to high quality, tested, regulated code is a challenge and one Inwould love to discuss in detail.

Anyway, must get some shuteye so I am ready for a day of napping at my desk.