Northern Futures

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…

Know your company

Know Your Company, from 37 Signals, is a really interesting looking idea. As with all their products, from Basecamp to Highrise, it has resulted from scratching their own itch – in other words, solving a problem they had. 37 Signals…

Introducing Kind of Digital Exchange

I read an awful lot of stuff on the web - thanks to Google Reader, it's made really easy. Lots of people don't have the time to do so, and are quite grateful to have useful items pointed out to them. I usually do this by putting links up on my Twitter profile, and the occasional link round up post here on the blog.

The trouble is that Twitter is a very ephemeral medium, and if people miss links, or don't record them anywhere, then finding them again can be very tough. What's needed is a way to record these things for posterity, and perhaps create a conversation around them.

Consumer IT Resets the Baseline for Corporate IT

Good stuff from Michael Coté: In moving to a BigCo job you quickly notice how different life behind the firewall is when it comes to IT. You’re often more limited than empowered. The advances in consumer IT (things like Facebook…

Portfolio: sharing council comms resources

Portfolio looks an interesting idea, coming out of Nottingham City Council. This, from an article at LGComms: We’re launching Portfolio, a web portal that allows public sector organisations to share marketing materials. Councils and other public authorities can sign up…

The end of the IT department

37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson: When people talk about their IT departments, they always talk about the things they’re not allowed to do, the applications they can’t run, and the long time it takes to get anything done. Rigid and…