Dave – Page 211 – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for July 17th through July 23rd

July 23, 2010

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Rewired State – hack UK online – "A one-day hack providing expert advice and prototyping for UK online centres, providing technical options for improving searching on the UK online centres website for a local centre, leading to an improved and more effective experience for the web user."
Government 2.0 – Best Practices Wiki / Australian Govt Social Media Handbook DRAFT – Interesting attempt to draft social media guidance via a wiki.
St. Augustine’s Tips for Knowledge Workers – "It is undoubtedly true that modern technologies can keep us from getting our work done." Undoubtably? Not sure about that.
Creating The Contribution Society – "It seems to me that social software, and architectures of participation, are two means to delivering on the promise of a Contribution Society, where your worth is at least partially measured on what you contribute, rather than what you own."
Big Society needs Big Democracy | The Democratic Society – "Instead, the Big Society and the network need to focus on creating a wider conversation in communities, which can move away from the Whitehall and Westminster world, and promote local solutions. They also need to create a deeper democratic conversation in those localities, to increase the effectiveness, legitimacy and coherence of local action."
Readness.com – the social news service on Readness.com – "a browser extension for Google Chrome that suggests content you'll enjoy based on what your friends read, as you browse the web."
Four authorities to experiment with Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ | Society | The Guardian – "Liverpool, the Eden Valley in Cumbria, Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire and Sutton and Cheam in south-west London will become "vanguard communities". All four authorities approached the government to experiment with running the parts of their public services they think they can administer better."
MockFlow: Free online Wireframe tool – Cool wireframing tool for websites and apps, with a (limited) free option.
Australian government’s Declaration of Open Government – "The Australian Government now declares that, in order to promote greater participation in Australia’s democracy, it is committed to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology."
tecosystems » The #thesiswp Controversy: WordPress, Themes and the GPL – Great summary of the recent WordPress open source community bust up. A good insight into the politics of some of this stuff.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Filling the opendata gaps

July 21, 2010

Hadley Beeman has posted about a great little project idea:

…there’s a gap between the government opendata vision and the reality. The datasets are often released full of unintelligible codes, information that the developers outside government (building apps and visualisations) would love to have. This makes sense to me: I’ve seen budget codes, cost centre codes, programme codes in my various government roles… I can imagine that analysis would be complicated if you didn’t have a legend or translations for them…

…The first thing we need is a tool to crowdsource metadata about government data. This should allow those who know something about the data (civil servants, local government officers, etc.) to easily mark it in such a way that everyone can see and use their knowledge.

Essentially, we will be adding to the datasets as they come out of government, so that everyone who wants to use them will have better data to work with.

It’s fair to say that I know nothing about opendata, other than that it is probably a good thing and that the more context that can be added to it, the better. It seems like Hadley’s project is a sound one and one that if it succeeds will brings a great deal of benefit both to government and to citizens – via our friends, the civil hackers.

Shane McCracken on Big Society

July 19, 2010

Shane McCracken is a good guy, and when he blogs about something it is worth paying attention. Here’s his view on the Big Society.

That is what Big Society is to me. Local people taking control of their local facilities and making them work. The swimming pool as we know it will close. We need to choose if, we as a town, want to keep it. It needs to become our swimming pool, not the council’s. Big Society isn’t about closing council run facilities. They are going to close anyway. We can’t afford them. Big Society is a way of keeping them open.

Some commentators have questioned whether enough people have enough time in order to run these facilities. The people who care passionately about the rugby club find time. The people who care passionately about their estates join the residents groups. The people who care passionately about education run the parents’ associations and join the board of governors. We’ll find out soon enough how passionate people are about keeping their post offices, museums and, of course, swimming pools.

Go read the whole thing.

ScotGovCamp coming real soon

July 18, 2010

The latest GovCamp is happening at the end of this month, on 31st July in Edinburgh, and it’s naturally called ScotGovCamp. Learning Pool are delighted to be sponsoring the event.

These events are always good value, and it will be great to be at one up in Scotland where there will be a lot of new faces, and the chance to meet online acquaintances in real life!

There are still a few tickets left, and you can pick one up here.

Great work by Lesley Thomson and colleagues in getting this together.

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