Saturday was UK Government Barcamp day. A day of fast moving fun, filled with energetic and enthusiastic people who thought that giving up their weekend in the cause of better government was a sensible and desirable thing to do. There was a huge amount of energy on the day, represented and amplified in the twitter [...]
As expected, there is now a video of Howard Rheingold’s Reboot Britain presentation – scroll down the thumbnails on the right, his is the last one (though there is lots of good stuff along the way worth being diverted by). I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but have seen enough to confirm my suspicion [...]
Months can go by without encountering a single guru, then before you know it, three come along in a single week (actually there were more, but they were so thick on the ground that some I merely brushed past on staircases, rather than hearing them speak). Second of the three was Howard Rheingold, famous as [...]
I have mixed feelings about a day spent at Reboot Britain. I am glad I went: I saw some interesting material and had some interesting conversations. But I also found it quite frustrating. The event as a whole seemed perpetually to be on the verge of breaking into a rich discussion, but it never quite [...]
The VRM challenge is not just that information is held in big databases. It is that every bit of process – human, clerical, IT system, legal framework, behavioural expectations – is currently designed, or rather has grown up over the years without very much overall design, on the assumption that data is to be found in databases.
Tower 09 was over a fortnight ago. My notes are, as always, close to illegible. The attribution of thoughts to speakers may bear no resemblance to what they think they said. The failure to attribute thoughts to speakers does not mean either that they didn’t have any or that they weren’t interesting. I was only [...]
The Tower 09 conference a week ago was interesting , a slightly smaller follow on to the bigger and brasher event a year ago. It was a curious event – quite a lot of good stuff, but in a format which feels increasingly old fashioned, and with a very strange sense of its place in [...]
The publication of the advert for the new Director of Digital Engagement has prompted an outburst of commentary, with two of the most interesting contributions both coming from Steph Gray, who is systematically crowdsourcing the real requirements of the job. And of course that process works both ways: it makes visible what the crowd thinks [...]
Martin Stewart Weeks has a question. For the most part, government is not being done in recognizably different ways and certainly not ways that, in any reasonable interpretation of the word, would count as ‘transformation’ . Underlying structures and systems remain largely unchanged. It’s even harder to discern much real shift in underlying culture and [...]
Seth Godin is providing advice on how to blend in with the natives: A blog is something you have (unlike a Facebook). And blog is also a verb. As in, “I have a blog, this blog, which you probably found by googling me. I blogged about Facebook (which I’m on but don’t use often). I [...]