Building local government 2.0

The Knowledge Hub is a terrifically ambitious project being run by IDeA, in partnership with CLG, to bring knowledge and information sharing to the local government sector. A mixture of technology and capacity building, the aim is to alter the…

Socialwok

As a user of Google’s enterprise tools, usually known as Google Apps, Socialwok looks very interesting. It sticks a social networking layer on top of your email, calendar, Docs and so on – something that the Google suite was really…

What makes for a decent Council website?

After the kerfuffle over the Birmingham City Council website, as expertly documented by Paul Canning, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about what a Council website should look like, and what it should actually do. This isn’t just…

Upcoming events

I’ve got a few speaking engagements coming up, as well as other events that look like fun… 1. Developing Public Sector Communications through Social Media, 15th September, London This is an LGC event, spending the whole day talking about how…

What I use

Sometimes it’s nice to hear what tech people use on a day to day basis. It’s useful to pick up hints and tips, and to pick up on cool tools you might not have heard of before. Here’s my day-to-day…

Obama’s democracy

Interesting paper from Delib on the approach to government taken by the Obama administration in the States: The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked. Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead…

Dotspots

DotSpots looks interesting: DotSpots is an annotation platform that allows users to add text or video comments to any piece of text on the web. Dotspots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an…

Let’s predict the lottery!

I rather enjoyed the Derren Brown stuff this week around predicting the lottery numbers. It was enjoyable and entertaining, and anyone expecting anything approaching seriousness was always going to be disappointed. But what of averaging out the views of the…