March 7, 2009
One of the most rewarding things about open sourcing your stuff – for example, some code we developed for an internal project – is seeing what clever people do with it in ways you wouldn’t expect. At my talk at eDemocracy 08, I put up the chart below to try to illustrate four of the…
February 27, 2009
As Harry’s explained over on The Dextrous Web, we’ve just open sourced the code behind ConsultationXML, the tool we’ve been working on which turns consultation PDF files into XML. It’s a 0.1 release so still full of bugs, but at least it’s out there. You can download the (documented) code, and/or have a play with…
February 9, 2009
A post over on the CILIP blog got me thinking about a couple of minor tweaks to the software behind digitalgovuk (which, lacking inspiration, I’ve called Bookmarklist. Rather than hard coding the base tag, we could make the URL a bit more hackable, and thus generate the same kind of friendly-looking listing of Delicious bookmarks…
February 6, 2009
I’m learning that old skool stakeholder engagement involves a lot of spreadsheets. We needed to work out which UK Parliamentary constituencies some organisations were in, to identify who needed to be contacted about an issue. 400 organisations, in fact. [UPDATE 2023 – The issue in question] Could have been a boring day’s work for someone,…
February 1, 2009
I’ve written before about the perennial problem of publishing documents online for comment. The solutions either seem to be clunky, laborious to setup or use, or problematically inaccessible to users without Javascript. The problem remains, but there’s an extra option now, in the shape of Commentariat, a customised WordPress theme we’ve developed at DIUS and…
December 1, 2008
I get asked from time to time for examples of how social media is being used in government, not just at DIUS but elsewhere. From mentions on Twitter or in blogs I follow, I can generally reel off two or three examples of X. But for a while I’ve wanted to have a more structured…
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…
