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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…

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…

The giant of local government social media at the coalface, Dan Slee, has gone freelance. I’m not sure why I’ve not written up Dan as one of my digital heroes here before, because he certainly is one. He’s the kind of innovator it’s hard to dismiss – someone with deep journalism and government experience, Zen-like…

So he’s off. Neil Williams, head of digital at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills today swaps pinstripes for his dress-down trademark hoody and joins the growing team at GDS. To be fair, he’s been there on and off for nearly a year (as his colleague remarked to me yesterday: ’emotionally, he’s been gone…

It’s been a while since I did one of my slots profiling some of the heroes working on web stuff inside the public sector, but as there seem to have been a few people moves announced recently, I thought I’d celebrate a bit of a phenomenon. Dafydd Vaughan announced this week that he’s leaving Consumer…

Cass has been quietly, but effectively, behind a lot of really effective digital engagement activity in government, both in her current role in the Digital team at the Department for Energy & Climate Change, and before that, as Web Manager at UK Trade & Investment. At UKTI – an organisation which takes its digital very…

Sometimes I jokingly describe BIS as the ‘middle east of central government’: renamed/merged/split/reformed more than its fair share of the time. To be fair, Defra might have a claim to the same title, having been, within recent memory, bits of MAFF, DTLR, DETR, and DECC, plus more than its fair share of quangos. In that…

Sir Phillip Green, efficiency advisor to the government, recently reportedly challenged public sector workers to treat public money as their own. One person who’s been doing this for a while is Jenny Poole, Head of Digital Engagement at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. She’s a former team member, and now client, of mine,…

As part of an occasional series on this blog, I want to introduce you to a few of the digital heroes and heroines doing great work inside the UK public sector. It’s not often my jaw literally drops open while reading a blog post, but it did when I read through Luke Oatham’s piece on…