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…

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The LG Group have today launched a feedback site to get views on the draft guidance that has been developed for councils on the based ways to approach publishing open data.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…

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…

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…

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…

Meet the communities

My good friend Steph Gray is organising a fab little event to get public sector types and existing online communities of interest together to see how they can work together. It’s a great idea for an event and should be…

Democracy, decisions and politicians

I’m thrashing around with a post about consultation, engagement and crowdsourcing and why efforts in this direction haven’t been massively successful for governments – whether in the UK or elsewhere. I’ll get it into a fit state to publish one…

Explaining cloud

An important part of the tech architecture of open government is use of the cloud. Here’s a nice presentation from Michael Coté explaining what cloud computing is, why it matters and what some of the issues are. What's up with…

How to make Government IT deliver savings

Interesting ebook report from The Network for Post-Bureaucratic Age: Better for Less Update: Mick provides his views on the report: Rather than auditing ICT, what we need in reality is a proposal, by some authors with an understanding of what…