Postbureaucrat

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

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Agent O

September 1, 2017

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…

Digital Hero: Stephen Hale

March 27, 2017

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…

On freelancing

April 1, 2014

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…

Farewell @neillyneil

January 11, 2012

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…

Digital Heroine: Cass Martin

October 26, 2010

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…

Digital Heroine: Jenny Poole

October 14, 2010

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,…

Digital Hero: Luke Oatham

September 23, 2010

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…