Postbureaucrat

It’s a hot week, so here’s my heatwave-hot hot takes on where digital comms under Prime Minister Boris Johnson might go. Given the Cabinet clear-out and the style of Boris and – crucially – his team, this feels more like the start of the Coalition in 2010 than the start of Theresa May’s government in…

A tweet from Dave reminded me how hard it is to actually work out loud. Since writing this at the end of March, I’ve been able to do precisely nothing about it! 😡 https://t.co/Eb8ffBEG2b — Dave Briggs (@davebriggs) June 17, 2019 For a start, you need the time to write something for yourself which nobody…

Chez Gray, we’re into our cooking. Not like crazy obsessive, but we’ve always enjoyed making interesting food. So over time, we’ve accumulated quite a lot of recipe books – over 80, actually. But despite them being to hand, and full of interesting recipes, we found we weren’t using them much. Some sat on the shelf,…

Like a lot of people, I ldentify strongly with the idea of no-nonsense. Being practical, and down to earth and rooted in experience and hard work. Not pretending to be what you’re not. When I started a business, I used ‘for people with more sense than money’ as strapline, which seemed to resonate. But a…

I don't tend to feel I can write much here about the other side of what I've been doing these past nine years - our crisis simulation work. But here's a little flight of fancy into what simulating social media crises has to do with planes. Or something.

Bureaucracies are quicker to mandate common solutions than they should be. Set common standards and require interoperability, for sure. Insist that teams achieve benchmarks and hygiene factors, but make the space for different approaches to compete within broad rules.

2008-9 was a good time for me. I was a few months into an amazing new job thinking about how a government department might use social media creatively for communications and policymaking; and in the early months too of being a new dad. Work-wise, our little team did some amazing things that year, from low…

My family enjoys trains, apps and adventure. In Episode 1, this led us to a half term adventure with The Traindomiser, an app we made to help us pick a random UK destination and tell us how to get there by train. We had a good time, via Wellingborough, Ingatestone, Aldershot and Southend. Our first…

I’ve not pitched a session at UKGovcamp for a few years, but I’m hoping to pitch one this year on something that’s been troubling me for a while. How does social media and digital culture affect our state of mind, and what can we practically do about it? A note of clarification on the title:…

We were having a family chat over breakfast one Sunday morning about the kind of holidays we enjoy: “Somewhere interesting & exciting” “Somewhere not too bleak” “Go interrailing” “Go somewhere on a beach” As it’s a truth commonly acknowledged that a chap in possession of a weekend must be in need of a coding project,…