Postbureaucrat

Personal blogging by Steph Gray, former digital agency founder and erstwhile bureaucrat

Featured posts

An incomplete field-spotters guide to the jungle beasts of the social media enterprise

November 4, 2008

Herewith in a half-dozen crisp pen-portraits, a description of some of the characters you are sure to meet as a missionary for social media in the curious jungle of social media in the enterprise: Macaques are fun and infuriating. They love to experiment, grabbing something and leaping away to play with it. They’re sociable types…

The Someday List: 1. Licensing

October 24, 2008

Seems all the cool kids are doing a series of themed blog posts, so I’ll join the party: over the next few weeks I’m going to cover four topics from my ‘Someday/Maybe’ list of applying social media in government: Licensing Accessibility Guidance Evaluation Let’s start with the one I’m most sketchy about: licensing. Image credit:…

The power of unconference

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…

Welcome to the machine

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…

Why I love social bookmarking

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…

Blessed are the developers

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…

Hassles and Handycams

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…