October 14, 2008
Imagine the scenario: They Who Must Be Obeyed want feedback on the new report they’re publishing next week. It’s a dozen or so pages long with fairly basic formatting (yes, I do indeed live in a dream world). Let’s assume for now that they genuinely do want feedback, and want it fast and cheap. The…
October 5, 2008
You don’t need to understand technology to grok understand social media, but frankly, it sometimes helps. Or at least a basic grounding in how AJAX is different from PHP, and why CSS won’t sort out your SQL will help you to follow what a developer is on about and whether they are likely to be…
September 28, 2008
I think it was clear it was going to be a good day during the introductions. Around fifty youth workers, technologists and others with an interest in youth participation from as far away as Lancashire, Devon, Norfolk and Wiltshire had gathered at DIUS on a Saturday morning for UKYouthOnline, organised by Tim Davies. With that…
September 12, 2008
I spent an interesting hour in the company of a long-serving colleague today, as part of a project we’re doing to look at the baseline skills and awareness of social media in the organisation. Peter (not his real name) first worked in the Department for Education in the late 1960s, and painted me a picture…
August 30, 2008
One day, when I can retire from all this social media stuff and become comfortably rich on the conference circuit, I’ll pepper my sell-out keynote speeches with colourful metaphors like the following: Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish. Accept that sh*t happens So much communication today – from the public and private sectors…
August 20, 2008
Sadly, I missed Jenny Bee’s session titled ‘Why I love Twitter’ at the UKGovWeb Barcamp back in January, but if I were ever to run one, I’d have to call it ‘Why I love Social Bookmarking’. Let me count the ways: It frees your favourites. I have a computer at home, and a computer at…
August 16, 2008
This week, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited a (non-government) project I last worked on nearly five years ago. The ‘temporary‘ system I built back then is still going – amazingly – but the team wanted some changes made. Various people had dabbled in the code since 2003, most recently the organisation’s…
August 1, 2008
“Let’s do some video case studies” “How about a little montage of the Minister doing the visit?” “We could do something on YouTube – you know, liven it up a bit” There’s something compelling about film, which is why so many events and launches open with an uplifting compilation to a jaunty soundtrack. They set…
July 18, 2008
Some consultations are basically dull. Some are politically-charged. Some are hurried. So when the Science and Society consultation came sauntering along, it was clear this was an opportunity too good to miss. It’s a genuine call for ideas, casting the net wide to improve the way that science is communicated, understood, taught, and recruited for.…
July 10, 2008
Policymaking should be an ongoing conversation between government and stakeholders, not a process where government stops listening when the consultation closes. That’s the vision behind Innovation Nation: Interactive which we’re taking the wraps off today. In a nutshell, it’s a summary version of the white paper on innovation which DIUS published in the Spring, developed…
