Tuesday, 29 September, 2009

Understanding Finance for Business

I’m spending some time today doing some social reporting for EEDA, my local regional development agency, at one of their Understanding Finance for Business workshops. I’m taking photos and recording quick interviews with some of those attending, as well as…

Monday, 28 September, 2009

UKGovCamp 2010 taking shape

After just one day, interest is already starting to build up for January’s barcamp. We have had a tonne of responses to the register of interest form, which is awesome, and have made significant headway in getting the venue arranged.…

Bookmarks for September 25th through September 28th

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 25th to September 28th: Improving data visualisation for the public sector – "Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to…

UkGovCamp 2010 – #ukgc10

The previous two UK government barcamps have been wonderful events – bringing people together to start and continue conversations about how web developments affect the public sector in this country. If we are going to run the event in January…

More on culture – Getting Real

To carry on the culture theme, I’ve recently been reading 37 Signals‘ book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. For those that don’t know, 37 Signals are the guys behind simple but useful…

Saturday, 26 September, 2009

Tuesday, 22 September, 2009

Zoho Discussions

You may not have heard of Zoho, but they are one of the leading providers of cloud-based applications on the web. If you are looking for an alternative to the likes of Google Docs, you might not go too far…

Bookmarks for September 21st through September 22nd

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 21st to September 22nd: Scitable | Learn Science at Nature – "A free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world's leading publisher of science. "…

Sunday, 20 September, 2009

Bookmarks for September 16th through September 20th

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 16th to September 20th: Postscript two: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster – Paul Canning keeps up the pace on the BCC website story. Crowd Fusion | Web Publishing…

Wednesday, 16 September, 2009

Building local government 2.0

The Knowledge Hub is a terrifically ambitious project being run by IDeA, in partnership with CLG, to bring knowledge and information sharing to the local government sector. A mixture of technology and capacity building, the aim is to alter the…

Socialwok

As a user of Google’s enterprise tools, usually known as Google Apps, Socialwok looks very interesting. It sticks a social networking layer on top of your email, calendar, Docs and so on – something that the Google suite was really…

Tuesday, 15 September, 2009

Monday, 14 September, 2009

What makes for a decent Council website?

After the kerfuffle over the Birmingham City Council website, as expertly documented by Paul Canning, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about what a Council website should look like, and what it should actually do. This isn’t just…

Sunday, 13 September, 2009

Upcoming events

I’ve got a few speaking engagements coming up, as well as other events that look like fun… 1. Developing Public Sector Communications through Social Media, 15th September, London This is an LGC event, spending the whole day talking about how…

What I use

Sometimes it’s nice to hear what tech people use on a day to day basis. It’s useful to pick up hints and tips, and to pick up on cool tools you might not have heard of before. Here’s my day-to-day…

Saturday, 12 September, 2009

Obama’s democracy

Interesting paper from Delib on the approach to government taken by the Obama administration in the States: The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked. Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead…

Dotspots

DotSpots looks interesting: DotSpots is an annotation platform that allows users to add text or video comments to any piece of text on the web. Dotspots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an…