July 16, 2010
Of all the projects I worked on at DIUS/BIS, the one I am still most proud of is still going strong, if quietly, today: the Mature Students partnership with The Student Room and Directgov. When I wrote about it in February 2009, I explained: There have been some good examples of ministers engaging with online…
June 29, 2010
I’ve been chatting to quite a range of folk grappling with the issue of what to do – on a shoestring – in the digital space with their Department in this brave and uncertain new world. It’s fair to say that digital plans in government right now have to take account of three realities: There’s…
March 24, 2010
It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science, and I’ve taken the pledge to write about a female heroine of science or technology. My everyday heroine is Marilyn Booth, a civil servant, working in Science & Society policy in a central government…
March 16, 2010
Shortly after the forthcoming General Election, I’ll be leaving the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Tomorrow will mark my second anniversary of working at BIS, and its predecessor, DIUS. It’s been a fantastic couple of years, which has introduced me to some phenomenally talented and creative people in and around government. I’ve been privileged…
March 14, 2010
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the BIS webbies (not for me though; I’ve been putting my feet up for the last week in rural Suffolk). A quick round-up of some of the highlights: A new website for BIS: Neil’s team, working with our corporate IT unit and EduServ, have been working ferociously…
February 17, 2010
Happy Birthday YouTube, which turned five earlier this week. The site that started in February 2005 now apparently serves over 5 billion video streams each month. I’ve been spending more time on YouTube recently, mainly thanks to Arthur’s compulsive viewing of classic theme tunes (seriously, like three hundred of those views are us). But the…
February 3, 2010
When the General Election is called, and government enters the pre-election phase known as purdah, I’m going to suspend my personal blogging and tweeting at least until the results are announced. Why? In a word, it’s too risky. This will be the first election with really active social media. Last time around, Whitehall Webby (2007)…
January 24, 2010
Photo credit: Sharon O’Dea Well, that’s another UK Gov Web Barcamp wrapped up, and #ukgc10 was a corker, not least thanks to the sterling efforts of Dave Briggs to organise the thing, and the generosity of Google in hosting us. It still impresses me that 120-odd people from all over the country would want to…
December 28, 2009
Photo credit: childofwar This time last year, I predicted 2009 would be the year of Less – fewer technology experiments, tighter resources, and involving a wider network of people in our projects. It didn’t quite turn out that way… but maybe I was just ahead of my time: 2010 is shaping up to be altogether…
December 9, 2009
In my line of work, keeping track of the threads is half the battle. At work, we have (for now) three corporate sites, a sandbox, a development environment, and more. We have social media channels – some corporately-managed, many managed by external agencies in support of our campaigns – and an active stakeholder and media…
