A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Ian Dunmore’s Punk Ethos in Government IT

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A personal reflection on my friendship with Ian Dunmore and the rise and fall of Public Sector Forums, exploring how his punk, do-it-yourself ethos created a space for civil servants to speak truth to power, and why those edges still matter today. Follow-up articles will touch on some of the hijinks he got me into (I got myself into), like being sacked and reinstated from my dream job, all within one day.

Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Some friendships in tech are transactional, business cards swapped, LinkedIn requests sent, and forgotten in a week. Others get under your skin and stay there. My friendship with Ian Dunmore sits firmly in the second category. It was messy, funny, unexpected, and in its way, formative. Ian wasn’t just a journalist, though he was a bloody good one. He had that punk, DIY ethos that said: don’t wait for permission, just do it. And he did. He co-founded Public Sector Forums (PSF), a space where civil servants could say the unsayable. For a while, it was alive with energy, whistleblowing, venting, laughing at the absurdities of Whitehall. Then, like so many good things, it burned out. But the story of Ian and PSF is also the story of a time when government IT felt like the Wild West, and of how punk sensibilities found their way into the heart of Whitehall.

Meeting Ian (via Alan Mather)

I met Ian through Alan Mather, the DG of the Government Gateway, and the first CTO of the eDT (the precursor of GDS). Alan had a remarkable determination and focus. He had a preternatural ability to spot bullshit, I suspect, gained through his years in banking before moving into the public sector. What set him apart was his ability to spot the truly clever people and get them working on the right things. He cut through the noise, had no patience for distraction, and yet always recognised and nurtured talent. He moved easily between ministers and permanent secretaries, and just as easily with Bill Gates and the wider tech world. My favourite Alan Mather quip? “No steering, just driving.” Hilarious, but also perfectly him: direct, unapologetic, cutting to the heart of things. Alan introduced me to Ian because he knew we’d get on. And of course, he was right. Getting back to the story, Alan suggested that I connect up with a journalist he knew, called Ian, who had kicked off this little initiative called “Public Sector Forums”.

Ian’s Punk Ethos

What struck me first about Ian was that punk sensibility. He wasn’t waiting for the perfect plan, or the civil service to commission a working group, or a consultancy to produce a hundred-slide deck. He saw a gap; civil servants needed a place to talk openly, and he filled it. It reminded me of the music scene: you want to make a record, you don’t know three chords, it doesn’t matter. Pick up a guitar, bash it out, make the record. That was Ian. He picked up the proverbial guitar and created Public Sector Forums. He was clever in ways I wasn’t, and still is. Where my mind was wired for systems, patterns, and architecture, his was wired for people. He could draw them in, make them feel heard, and create a space where they wanted to contribute. That was his genius.

Public Sector Forums – A Potted History

The detailed chronology of PSF, its incorporation, growth, events, and winding-up, deserves its own space. Rather than break the story here, I’ve set it out in an appendix below. What matters for now is that PSF gave practitioners a platform at a time when government IT sorely needed one, and that platform changed the tone of the conversation.

Short timeline

In Summary

PSF occupied a formative niche: it gave hands-on practitioners a place to share, challenge, and improve each other’s work during the messy birth of UK digital public services. If today’s Local Digital playbooks and public-sector community forums feel “normal,” it’s partly because PSF and its contemporaries made that style of open, practice-led exchange the norm.

Why PSF Mattered

PSF wasn’t just another online forum. It was a pressure valve. Inside government, people were suffocating in bureaucracy, unable to say what everyone knew but no one dared to put on the record. PSF gave them that outlet. Managers got skewered, programmes were ripped to shreds, and policies were taken apart with both barrels. It was raw, often funny, and sometimes brutal, but it was true. About what was and wasn’t working. That mattered. It shaped conversations. It was read, sometimes nervously, in Whitehall. And it had a sense of community. You’d see threads where civil servants compared notes, warned each other about pitfalls, and, in their own rough way, looked out for one another. It was messy, imperfect, human. I think it was the first time I had personally witnessed the camaraderie of Civil Servants en masse, and it was wonderful.

Friendship with Ian

My friendship with Ian was forged in that ethos. He was subtle, funny, and quick to cut through nonsense to the heart of the issue. But he was also kind in ways that don’t always get noticed, the kind of kindness that shows up as time, or as making space for someone, or as the right joke at the right moment; he was attentive.

I admired him because he did things I couldn’t. He had that preternatural ease with people, where I was always better with systems. And he lived by his own rules, unafraid to be punk as fuck in a world that constantly tried to sand down the edges.

Reconnection Years Later

Fast forward a couple of decades. I’d been spinning up Cyber Tzar, and we reconnected. Same old Ian, insightful, wry, endlessly helpful. He helped me think through vision and direction, how the moving parts fitted together. By then, he’d relocated to Australia, and he kept inviting me over; he still does. I kept saying, ‘Yes, once I’ve got less work,’ and then of course I piled on more. That’s me. But one day, I’ll get there.

Conversations on the State of the Internet

When Ian and I talk now, it often circles back to the state of the Internet. We both remember when it felt like the Wild West, messy, funny, experimental. Today, it is more like a series of fenced-off estates, increasingly bounded by sovereignty claims, compliance regimes, and ID schemes. Everyone wants to be China, or at least mimic its model of control. The fun, the serendipity, and the rough edges have been blunted.

Ian channels his critique into art. He’ll send me surreal videos, Baudrillard for Babbies Explained by a Cat, or Deleuze & Guattari for Elementary School. Hyperreality wrapped in absurdity, voiced by Genesis P-Orridge or his contemporaries. Funny, sharp, a punk reminder not to take the surface at face value. That’s Ian: using humour and semiotics to cut through the noise.

Deleuze & Guattari for Elementary School. – by Ian Dunmore

AI Content: Polished but Hollow, or Just Obfuscated?

But the humour carries weight. In one long exchange, he shared a clip about a Brazilian judge demanding global takedowns of online content. His take: this isn’t just law, it’s the architecture of a future internet of walled gardens, where sovereignty trumps universality. “We’ll end up like fkn China,” he said. I agreed, adding that Western governments seem disturbingly keen to copy that playbook. The internet fragments into “us and them territory.”

We also batted around the so-called Dead Internet Theory, which I’ve written about in It’s the End of the Internet and I Feel Fine. Ian once summed up the platforms more brutally: “Twitter is murder.” For him, it wasn’t just noise; it was a system that actively strangled nuance.

My view was straightforward: humans have always generated rubbish; bots just automate more of it (I like to say it’s an LCD problem, aka “lowest common denominator”). As is typical, Ian was more reflective. “Most of what we scroll through now looks polished but hollow”, he said, quoting Meghan O’Rourke in her recent NYT column. Making a point that convincing façades masking empty content. He’d also picked up François Chollet’s metaphor of “digital acid rain”, a slow, corrosive downpour that eats away at originality until everything looks the same.

Here’s where I sometimes describe myself as an anti-intellectual intellectual. I’ve never had much patience for cleverness for its own sake, or for “experts” who’ve never delivered anything real, for me, that would be an actual living, breathing IT system, but creation is good. So, OK, learned knowledge is great, yes, but the lived experience of application matters more. Above all, critical analysis is the seam of gold we mine. I’ll quote Baudrillard or Pirsig if it helps make a point, but only because I’ve tested those ideas against the grit of delivery. That’s what struck me with AI: it obfuscates quality. It masks the difference between the good and the mediocre, so you spend more time working out if something has merit. If you want to get clever, it blurs the objective/subjective axis that Robert M. Pirsig argued defines quality in his Metaphysics of Quality. Ian agreed with that immediately.

Sovereignty and the Balkanised Web

Around the edges of that debate came sovereignty and cloud. I reminded him I’d argued for a UK sovereign cloud back in 2009, not from flag-shagging nationalism but from a pragmatic view of control. When he sent me the clip of a Brazilian judge demanding global takedowns, his commentary was characteristically blunt: “Fuckers.” Ian shot back that when one jurisdiction can order global takedowns, and another can order restoration, the whole exercise becomes farcical. He’s right: it’s a recipe for Balkanisation. And it sits in the wider age of demagogues, Trump, Putin, Erdoğan, and their ilk, something I’ve written about before in Plato, Democracy, and the Path to Tyranny.

So our late-night messages, cats explaining hyperreality, riffs on 77th Brigade psy-ops, AI-generated music, Trump rants, Brazilian judges, all circle the same truth. The internet isn’t dead, but it’s mutating. The danger isn’t just bots or trolls. It’s the slow erosion of the wild, open, weird internet we grew up with, replaced by a sanitised, sovereign-branded version. His final word on it, half-joking and half-serious: “We’re balls deep in self-regulating complex systems now”.

Ian, ever punk, reminds me why those edges matter: because the edges are where the real work gets done.

Conclusion

Ian mattered. Public Sector Forums mattered. Together they created a space where civil servants could be human, and where truth, however messy, could surface.

For me, Ian was also a friend who reminded me that you don’t need permission to do something important. You just need the conviction to do it. That’s punk. And Ian was punk as fuck.

And if there’s one thing I’ve taken from knowing him, from PSF, from our conversations, from that surreal cat video, it’s that the edges are worth keeping. Bureaucracy will always try to sand them down. Institutions will always want to flatten differences into bland conformity.

The real change, the real fun, the real humanity, it all happens at the edges, at the periphery. Ian lived there, unafraid and unapologetic. And he reminded me that the edges are where the real work gets done.

Appendix A: Public Sector Forums – Timeline & References

At this point, it’s worth stepping back from my personal memories; segue into the world of facts. What follows is my attempt to be objective, to put down a concise history of Public Sector Forums (PSF), what it was, what it did, and what it left behind. I’ve drawn on Companies House records, contemporaneous blogs, and archived material to do justice to its role.

Origins (2002–2004)

What PSF did (mid-2000s)

Notable moments

Business model & footprint

  • Blend of media + events. PSF straddled an online publication/community with paid events and sponsorship, typical of early-web B2G media. Its social handles and slide repositories (later branded PSFBuzz) show an evolution toward community-led formats.

Decline and winding-up (2010–2011)

Legacy and successors

Appendix B: References

Links from Ian Dunmore

Links from Wayne Horkan