An online notebook
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An online notebook
When I delivered the Civil Service Learning digital engagement for policymakers course with Steph Gray, Steph put in a really neat slide which explained that different people have different needs from any one engagement exercise. Some people are happy to…
We’re probably due an update, not least because people keep asking me about VirtualGovCamp – and one of main topics people are querying is how on earth this thing is going to work. To reiterate some of the things I…
There’s an interesting bit of open policy work going on at the moment with the Deputy Prime Minister’s office working with the Policy Lab and Open Policy Making team, who are both based at the Cabinet Office. I’m lucky enough…
One of the things that I love about being a blogger is the encouragement it gives me to write. Writing helps. It’s fair to say, I think, that if you want to get good at something, then writing about it…
If you’re going to make your organisation sit up and take notice when it comes to new, digital ways of doing things, you need to get out there and sell them. Pretend you’re a techie startup trying to sell your…
I’m a bit ambivalent about Trello as a project management tool – I know others love it, but me, I prefer something that looks a bit more spreadsheety. If you’ve not heard of Trello – here’s a video that explains it.…
I ran my second webinar this morning, based on the first of my Think Digital principles. I think it went ok. Here’s the video recording: And here are the slides (here’s a PDF version if you need them):
So I got my new iPhone 6 on Friday – don’t judge me, I was due an upgrade anyway – and have been using it all weekend. Here are some early thoughts. 1. The size – it’s a bit too…
Recently on my visits to councils and to conferences, and in the conversations I have with people across the public sector, leadership in digital has been identified as an issue. I think the problem is that within many organisations, there’s…
I’m at Channel Shift Camp in Birmingham today, organised by my good friend Nick Hill. It’s an opportunity for people involved in customer services in the public sector to talk about ways of delivering services using new channels, such as…
It isn’t said enough, I don’t think, that change – particularly in big organisations – is hard. Really hard! If it wasn’t, it would be happening all the time. At events there are regularly discussions that go on along the…
I was never a regular user of Whatsapp, the mobile messaging app recently purchased by Facebook for gazillions of dollors, but now I’m never touching the thing again. Why? Well, after a recent update, every single time I open the app,…
When planning a new project or activity, it’s easy to decide to get something new. For instance, you might see it as the perfect opportunity to buy a cool web service to help you deliver this piece of work. Or…
I couldn’t agree more with Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger: We can’t force people to participate, and if we really care about educating people, we shouldn’t try. We should build and design for the people who are participating, and we should be…
Sometimes it’s better to embrace constraints. Why not even invent some? Constraints don’t need to make things harder – they can make things easier. Why take a year to deliver something if you can get it out of the door…
An ongoing debate this. Ben Proctor has had his say recently, and it feels fairly sensible. There are two issues at stake here – one is whether some kind of ‘GDS’ for local government is needed; second is whether we…
A clipboard manager is an insanely useful bit of productivity kit. It’s one of those things that you may not know even exists, but once you start using it, you can never go back. A quick reminder: the clipboard is…
There are a lot of problems out there that need fixing. Some are big, and complicated. Others are quite small, and simple. Why not try picking one of the small and simple ones, and fix it? Back in 2007, I…
I’ve seen a few comments bouncing about Twitter and other places debating the meaning of the word digital, and why it hasn’t caught on in some places at all. I’ve also seen some people saying that ‘digital’ is an unhelpful…
The way to make things happen is to let them go. I learned this from hard experience. For the last three or four years I spent my time trying to build a business. It didn’t go very well. It turns…