Links

LINK: “The Hitchhikers guide to Engaging SMEs and Local Government in Innovation”

Due to time constraints, many Local Government Service leads are inevitably ‘heads down’ and perhaps overwhelmed by the variety of technology on offer. It can be hard to team up with neighbouring boroughs because that adds complexity and may slow things down through collaborative decision making. They need more ‘heads up’ time to reflect and review what is going on elsewhere, and try to be open minded and consider wider options – we as SMEs on the other hand need to present our products in terms of their benefits, in plain English, not as a technology offer.

Original: https://medium.com/@hilary.simpson/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-engaging-smes-and-local-government-in-innovation-d9b6d371feff

LINK: “The Bill Gates Line”

‘A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’

Original: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/

LINK: “Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless”

The endless noise emanating from Silicon Valley essentially has two complementary elements. One is all about dreams so unlikely that they beggar belief: the idea that the Tesla CEO Elon Musk will one day set up a colony on Mars; or that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can successfully marshal an attempt to “cure, prevent and manage” all diseases in a single generation. Whatever its basis in fact, this stuff casts people and corporations as godlike visionaries, and then provides a puffed-up context for the stuff the big tech companies shout about week in, week out: stuff we either don’t need or, worse, which threatens some of the basic aspects of everyday civilisation.

Original: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley

LINK: “Why Local Government must share the driving to accelerate transformation benefits”

There is a huge opportunity for local authorities to share common digital service patterns for highly defined, commoditised services that are repeated across multiple organisations. For services like reporting missed bins, FOI requests and complaints for example, how fundamentally different should the user journeys for these services be between individual authorities? Or, put another way, at a time of such pressure on public finances, can we continue to justify the level of local variation in the design and delivery of these services that we continue to see across the country?

Original: https://methods.co.uk/blog/local-government-must-share-driving-accelerate-transformation-benefits/

LINK: “And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet”

As a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter and, more recently, as the chief executive of the digital publishing platform Medium, Mr. Williams transformed the way millions of people publish and consume information online.

But as his empire grew, he started to get a gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. High-quality publishers were losing out to sketchy clickbait factories. Users were spending tons of time on social media, but they weren’t necessarily happier or better informed. Platforms built to empower the masses were rewarding extremists and attention seekers instead.

Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/business/ev-williams-twitter-medium.html

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