October 14, 2010
Linus’ Law says that, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It’s one of the paradoxes of open source, community-driven software that we can know it is good on the strength of how much is known about its frailties. Simon Dickson opened and closed the first WordUp Whitehall event yesterday with a reminder that WordPress…
September 2, 2010
At TeaCamp today, I’m taking the Campers through one of my new projects, Read+Comment, designed to offer hassle-free publishing of commentable documents online. Introducing Read+Comment from Steph Gray It’s based on some work I’ve done recently for BIS, updating the Commentariat WordPress theme so that the team can roll out more flexible sites around their…
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 10, 2010
When DIUS launched its Science and Society consultation in July 2008, I took the opportunity to throw the kitchen sink at a consultation, digitally-speaking. Not all of it worked (in fact, hardly any of it did, you could argue), but I learned some useful lessons and the policy team have maintained their appetite for engaging…
January 18, 2010
A quick one – today at work we’re launching ‘Unleashing Aspiration’: the Government’s response to the review of access to the professions, which was led by Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP and reported last year. The digital brief was, on the face of it, not massively exciting – it’s a long document, covering 88 recommendations,…
January 8, 2010
If there’s one thing Barack Obama taught us about the power of digital by the manner of his election, it’s that email still counts (and, for that matter, still works when you’re in government). For a while, I’ve been determined to focus more on how we use email as a corporate communication channel, particularly in…
October 27, 2009
At Reboot Britain earlier this year, I did a short talk on the direction of online consultation, and mused that the future would be about: Different strokes for different folks: multi-layered consultations that work for stakeholders and citizens Getting ideas from customers and the front-line Making consultation documents themselves more accessible and understandable Today at…
September 21, 2009
There’s plenty of WordPress-powered online properties in Government right now and some very busy freelancers building them. For a while now, I’ve been trying to compile a list of useful people, agencies, tools and resources for WordPress, so I thought I’d kick it off here. It’s obviously incomplete, and mention here does not necessarily constitute…
September 17, 2009
When BIS was created, we were pretty chuffed to have got a solid website built and launched in 72 hours. But as the weeks passed and the organisation started to build up achievements and an identity of its own, people started to ask when something, y’know, a bit meatier was going to arrive. Today, we…
June 11, 2009
Imagine – hypothetically – you go to work on a Friday morning, and by 5pm (after a busy day of coffee and muffins), your organisation technically doesn’t exist any more. After the initial flurry of rebranding, you decide you need a holding website of some sort, to tell people about the newly-branded organisation while you…
