Public Strategist

“Best practices” are – by definition – not innovative. Mark Drapeau (via Bruce Johnson)

Here’s a small cautionary tale of unintended consequences. It explains why the particularly eagle eyed will have seen a post on the blog this morning which quickly disappeared – though not quite quickly enough to stop it propagating round the web. Over the weekend, I installed the new Guardian wordpress plugin, more out of curiosity than because [...]

I have had a blog post half written about transparency and opening government data for a couple of weeks, but the words aren’t yet saying what I want them to – it needs a bit more focused concentration than I have been able to give it. While I have been musing, a new and superb [...]

In every organization, there is at least one awesome idea that can upset the status quo. The challenge is finding it – and freeing it. Umair Haque

The Google Reader team are pleased with themelves, not without reason: Today we built the 500th version of Reader; over the 5 years that we’ve worked on Reader, that works out to almost two builds a week. I suspect that’s distinctive, if at all, only in that they are both keeping score and saying so [...]

Your first design may seem like a solution but it is usually just an early definition of the problem you are trying to solve from. Luke Wroblewski (viaLee McIvor)

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. Clay Shirky

Rewired State has taken another step towards becoming the next generation systems integrator for government.  In a piece of delightful recursion, a Rewired State project becomes the vehicle for accessing the formal status of Rewired State – or as it has been since last Monday, Rewired State Ltd. In other news, the Rewired State gang [...]

It’s been a while since I linked to one of Jessica Hagy’s Indexed cards, which neatly capture connections contrasts and overlaps.  This one sets a question for service designers, and perhaps especially public service designers.   Do brilliant ideas have to have polarised responses, or can they be brilliant and inclusive? If we can do brilliant [...]

Innovation requires failure. @rufflemuffin