The death of crowd control

James Gardner: The point,  of course, is that if the central thinking is that communications are about crowd control, then organisations are really forcing the many-to-many communication outside their organisation. Although I don’t think we are about crowd control at the…

Public Sector Online 2010

Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day. I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny: As…

101 cool tools: Paper.li

This is a new regular series of posts where I highlight a cool online service that you may or may not have heard of. Whether I ever make it to 101 is debatable I feel… I’ve also set up a…

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The LG Group have today launched a feedback site to get views on the draft guidance that has been developed for councils on the based ways to approach publishing open data.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

DavePress podcast 3 – Tim Davies

Finally, the third DavePress podcast! Here I chat to Tim Davies of Practical Participation about open data and his research into the subject. [audio:] If you can’t, or don’t want to, use the flash player, you can download the .mp3 instead or subscribe…

Learn WordPress.com

WordPress is a great bit of software, and by far the easiest way to get up and running with it is to use the usually free hosted version at WordPress.com. It’s even easier to get started than ever, with Learn…

Phones, phones, phones

To probably misquote Stephen Fry: “Was there ever a smartphone that I didn’t buy?” As I posted a little while ago, I’m pretty happy with the Nexus One. Android is a nice, feature rich, open operating system, and the hardware…

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…

Back to school

I’ve just registered to do some proper studying – for the first time since I left university in 2001. It’s through the Open University, and the qualification is a BSc (Honours) Technology. I’m entirely self taught when it comes to…

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…

My setup

One of my favourite bits of technology porn is Shawn Blanc’s series on sweet Mac setups. It basically just gives dorks like me an opportunity to drool over other people’s kit. But there’s another purpose to this, which is that…

Sharing and flexibility

Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website. Go read the whole thing, but he summarises: So what have we learned? People blogging about what they are up to is dead…

Careers 2.0

Two strangely related things happened last week. The second one was Dominic Campbell‘s post, “Exciting times” in which he describes the progress he has made over the last few years, and how odd – and amazing – the whole thing…

Stimulating informed debate around AV

Steph provides an update on the AVdebate project (cross-posted from Helpful Technology). Six weeks ago, Dave kicked off a little project which he described as follows: I’m rather interested in the referendum that we are going get get next May in…

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…

6 months of Google

Paul McElvaney, Director at Learning Pool, posts an update on how the company is faring with Google’s suite of enterprise tools for email, calendaring etc. Learning Pool moved its corporate systems like email, calendaring and document storage into a Google…