Dave

Dave

  • Joined: January 6, 2026
  • Articles: 3167
  • Comments: 518

The soul of a new iPhone

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…

Lacking leadership

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…

Communicating customer access

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…

Change is hard

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…

Use what you already have

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…

Loving lurkers

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…

Embrace constraints

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…

In praise of the clipboard manager

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…

Find a problem, and fix it

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…

Just what is digital, exactly?

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…

WordPress 4.0 is out

Oh, goody. A new version of WordPress is out! WordPress 4.0 is here, and it’s packed with new features: New media manager Embedded media now visual within the editor The editor now works more smoothly, expanding as necessary to fit…

Get rid of friction

If you want to get people to use your service, get rid of the friction. This really hit home with me the other week, at an event I attended as part of my work at the Department of Health, which…

#VirtualGovCamp FAQ

I’ve started putting an FAQ together for #VirtualGovCamp. Here’s the first effort. Any more questions? Ask in the comments… What is VirtualGovCamp? VirtualGovCamp is an event which will take place online for people with an interest in improving public services.…

Why is #virtualgovcamp a good idea?

Quick update – there’s now a placeholder site for #virtualgovcamp live at (it currently forwards to a wordpress.com blog) and a Twitter account @virtualgovcamp. At some point I will get all the content from the blog posts here replicated…

VirtualGovCamp

I’d like to propose VirtualGovCamp. I’ve just been made aware that the lovely folks at LocalGovDigital are themselves working on a local version of a virtual unconference type event. That should be awesome, but I think my idea is sufficiently different…

Developing your Yammer group

There are lots of guides out there on using Yammer, the internal social networking tool – how to set up a network, build your profile and so on. However, that’s not all there is to Yammer and a key skill…