Month: November 2010

My manifesto for councils engaging online

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to the national conference of the Society for Local Council Clerks up in Durham. It was a great conference with a group of people who really care about what they do and the communities they help serve.

My talk was on the usual stuff of how the web can help all of this happen. Particularly pertinent for this sector, where over half of Parish, Town or Community Councils don’t have a website. Most of the councillors in this sector don’t use email.

(I do sometimes think that we forget, in all the excitement about the new forms of online tools, just how utterly brilliant the act of simply publishing stuff online is. The fact that it is so easy, and can reach so many people!)

So, to help them out, I produced a ten point manifesto for what to do and where to start with this stuff.

If I’m honest, I threw this together in ten minutes whilst slightly hungover. However, I think there is value in most of it, and it would be interesting if others would pitch in and suggest some improvements.

Here’s the ten points:

  1. Get the basics right
  2. Don’t spend lots of money
  3. Go where people already are
  4. Don’t forget: what you say is permanent and findable
  5. Use the right tool for the right crowd
  6. Promote online stuff with offline stuff
  7. Be open, honest and human
  8. Don’t overburden with process
  9. Make your stuff findable, sharable and reuseable
  10. Think: how does the web change the way we do everything?

The entire slidedeck is embedded below.

Importance of workflow in social technology

From Gartner’s Mark McDonald:

Too many people think of a wiki as another knowledge management tool. Knowledge management tools are something that is separate from your day to day workflow. That attitude will need to change along with the technology that integrates wiki technology into the workflow in order to have people say ‘put it up on the wiki’ rather than inventing an ad hoc process that takes time, resources and puts bottlenecks in the flow of information.

As I found myself writing over and over again when describing the social tools I use, it’s all about workflow.

The best software keeps out the way and just lets you do stuff. There shouldn’t be anything new to learn, and the process should be completed within one or two clicks of a mouse.

It’s also individual, of course. What fits in my workflow might not fit in yours, and learning and knowledge technology needs to be able to fit in seamlessly, nonetheless.

No more Windows?

Well, in a decade perhaps.

If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to write fondly about Windows, well, James Gardner (kind of) gives it a go in his recent post on the desktop upgrade about to take place at the DWP:

It feels funny, doesn’t it, thinking about Windows in the context of being irrelevent, after all these years we’ve relied on it. I guess it proves, again, that change is the only constant.

As James puts it earlier in his post:

I think this will likely be the last verion of Windows we ever widely deploy, though.

The reason? I think we’ll have fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that’s coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most of our stuff will arrive via the browser.

So it looks like Scott McNealy and Sun were right all along. The network is the computer.

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