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Products vs. Communities
Jonathan Schwarz, then CEO of Sun Microsystems: As will become more obvious by the day, you can compete against a product, but it’s close to impossible to compete against a community.
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Events, dear boy…
My diary is starting to fill up a bit with events to attend, and those I have been asked to speak at. Here’s a quick run down. FirePRO Conference – Wednesday 13th October I’ll be speaking to the conference for…
The death of crowd control
James Gardner: The point, of course, is that if the central thinking is that communications are about crowd control, then organisations are really forcing the many-to-many communication outside their organisation. Although I don’t think we are about crowd control at the…
Public Sector Online 2010
Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day. I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny: As…
Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants
I love stuff like this. Nick Charney works in government in Canada, and is also a prolific and excellent blogger. He’s also pretty active on GovLoop, which is where I first came across him I think. Anyway, follow his stuff.…
101 cool tools: Paper.li
This is a new regular series of posts where I highlight a cool online service that you may or may not have heard of. Whether I ever make it to 101 is debatable I feel… I’ve also set up a…
Open source and government
Another post I have been sat on and chewing over for a little while… Charles Arthur in the Guardian highlighted an interesting area of discussion in the use of open source in government a little while ago. He reports on…
Bookmarks for September 20th through October 1st
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change – Great stuff on deploying social tech within big organisations. Open Government Licence – "You are encouraged to use and re-use the Information…
Guidance for councils on publishing data
The LG Group have today launched a feedback site to get views on the draft guidance that has been developed for councils on the based ways to approach publishing open data. As the site says: Many authorities already publish considerable…
DavePress podcast 3 – Tim Davies
Finally, the third DavePress podcast! Here I chat to Tim Davies of Practical Participation about open data and his research into the subject. [audio:] If you can’t, or don’t want to, use the flash player, you can download the .mp3 instead or subscribe…
Learn WordPress.com
WordPress is a great bit of software, and by far the easiest way to get up and running with it is to use the usually free hosted version at WordPress.com. It’s even easier to get started than ever, with Learn…
Phones, phones, phones
To probably misquote Stephen Fry: “Was there ever a smartphone that I didn’t buy?” As I posted a little while ago, I’m pretty happy with the Nexus One. Android is a nice, feature rich, open operating system, and the hardware…
YouChoose
In what looks like a pretty interesting collaboration between what was the LGA Group and YouGov, YouChoose is an online budget simulator that: encourages members of the public to consider where council budget cuts should fall, where efficiencies might be…
Technology, learning and knowledge
I had a good time up in Scotland last week, and enjoyed putting together and delivering my talk at the Learning Pool event we ran – which saw a great turnout. My discussion focused on the use of technology in…
Getting crowdsourcing right
Steph has a great post about crowdsourcing in government: It’s human nature to want to work on your own projects, rather than those imposed upon you. It’s human nature to want to earn recognition, intellectual satisfaction and a good living…
Back to school
I’ve just registered to do some proper studying – for the first time since I left university in 2001. It’s through the Open University, and the qualification is a BSc (Honours) Technology. I’m entirely self taught when it comes to…
The dynamic learning environment
Here’s a nice little video we have produced to help people understand the benefits of the Learning Pool learning management system – what we call the DLE. It’s a cloud-based implementation of the open source Moodle platform, with some added…
My setup
One of my favourite bits of technology porn is Shawn Blanc’s series on sweet Mac setups. It basically just gives dorks like me an opportunity to drool over other people’s kit. But there’s another purpose to this, which is that…
Sharing and flexibility
Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website. Go read the whole thing, but he summarises: So what have we learned? People blogging about what they are up to is dead…
Careers 2.0
Two strangely related things happened last week. The second one was Dominic Campbell‘s post, “Exciting times” in which he describes the progress he has made over the last few years, and how odd – and amazing – the whole thing…