Where does social media belong?

Well done Ingrid, whose post has caused a number of interesting discussions to kick off. One is around where social media activity belongs within an organisation. She writes (on her newish personal blog, which you really ought to subscribe to)…

Top posts in 2010

As is customary at this time of year, a list of the most popular posts I’ve published here is probably in order. Oh dear, Andrew Marr… Adventures in open source land Why chief executives should blog Where next for digital…

Parliamentary online petitions

So, online petitions for Parliament? In an attempt to reduce what is seen as a disconnection between the public and parliament, ministers will ensure that the most popular petition on the government website Direct.gov.uk will be drafted as a bill.…

Whither open government in 2011?

Ingrid has published a set of five rather grim predictions for next year. Go and take a look, and make one of your new year resolutions to stop them from happening. Here are some thoughts from me on what might…

GovCamp 2011 update

So another 50 tickets were released for January’s Govcamp this morning, and they went within twenty minutes. Remarkable. There is still space, but very limited. If you want to come along, please leave your name on the waiting list. There’s…

When clouds don’t taste so delicious

There appears to be a considerable amount of uncertainty about the future of Delicious, the web’s preeminent social bookmarking service. Not sure what social bookmarking is? Here’s a video: It seems a shame that Yahoo! have been unable to…

101 cool tools: Doodle

I haven’t done one of these for a while, sorry! Here’s the third in my series of 101 cool social media tools, it’s Doodle! Doodle is a neat little tool for organising when to meet groups of people. Someone starts…

The network is the computer

Google announced a bunch of stuff last week, finally bringing to the mainstream some bits of tech that have been bubbling away for a few years now. One is the Chrome operating system, a lightweight OS for netbooks that pretty…

Online Networked Neighbourhoods Study

Networked Neighbourhoods have published their study into local websites. Written by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris, it is as excellent as you would imagine it ought to be. For lazy people, here’s a link to the four-page summary (PDF warning).…

The book

So, the contracts are signed and returned, and it’s all official. I’m writing a book. Sorry to all of my fans out there who were hoping this would be my first volume of poetry – you’ll all just have to…

Wikileaks and radical transparency

The one thing that the internet does more than anything else, is that it brings the cost of distributing information to zero, no matter how far you are distributing it. We’re only now, I think, starting to be aware of…

Change for the better

It’s pretty obvious that local government, like all areas of public service, is facing a challenging time. Most of Learning Pool’s customers work within Organisational Development, or Learning and Development roles, and when budgets get cut, it’s often training that…

Open government needs more skills

Apologies for the total lack of updates here. A recent burst of activity at Learning Pool has made thinking about what to blog about a bit trickier than usual. Luckily, the Public Sector Bloggers do a damn fine job taking…

Learning Pool content jam

Learning Pool is running a ‘content jam‘ event in December in Birmingham, on Tuesday the 7th, at Fazeley Studios. It’s a new type of event for us, and one I had a bit of a role in putting together. What…

The future of comms in local government

The Local by Social online conference (various levels of sign-up required) is turning out to be a bit of a triumph. Yesterday saw some fascinating discussions about various elements of technology (mostly web) enabled change. Well done Ingrid (and team)!…