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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,…

September 2012: five years ago. The paralympic and olympic champions were parading down the Strand. David Cameron and Nick Clegg were crowdsourcing ways to cut red tape. GOV.UK was still an alpha. Luke Oatham quit his newly permanent civil service job to come and work with me. Like all good business decisions, neither of us…

I’ve been at the annual summer CommsCamp unconference event in Birmingham today organised by the awesome Dan Slee, Emma Rogers and volunteer team. The 20-things-I-learned format is a good one, so here goes again: The General Data Protection Regulation kicks in from May 2018 and we should all learn more about it: not least because we’ll…

The thing about digital engagement is, followed to its logical conclusion, it drives a rational person to despair. To do online consultation well, you really need to fix consultation itself, which involves rethinking the roles of Civil Servant and minister, and finding precious pockets of political will and bureaucratic opportunity, rare as hens’ teeth. Focussing on…

Taking a cue from Matt Jukes and others, here’s some of my abiding memories of 2016, in pictures: Took a bit more time to think and let things percolate on my daily commute into London. Tried looking for answers to Why (which I struggle with), as well as How (which is where I’m more comfortable). Found…

When Stephen Hale blogs about something, I usually stroke my chin and nod approvingly. But there’s something in his latest post – about favouring expert skill over gifted amateurs, the troubles me quite a lot. In practice, if we need graphic design, we either need an in house graphic designer to do it or we need…