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LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #3 – collaboration is key

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Mary McKenna brilliantly facilitated an excellent discussion on collaboration – why it is needed, why it hasn’t worked that well up to now, and how that might be fixed.

Some great input came from FutureGov‘s Dom Campbell, who spoke about the some of the challenges trying to implement their Patchwork tool across multiple agencies.

There was also discussion of the limitations of the traditional approach to partnership working – overly bureaucratic, slow to make decisions, agencies working individually to deliver what should be shared objectives, really boring meetings, and so on.

What’s needed is a more agile, responsive and flexible approach to working in partnership to deliver shared outcomes.

This needs to mean organisations sharing people, resources, systems, data and more – and not just tick-box style partnerships.

What’s also vital to to this working are grown up conversations are needed about who can deliver what with the resources they have. This is no time for pride.

Podcasts you might like

As well as making my own podcast, I also love listening to those created by other people.

Here are some of my favourites – maybe you will like them too!

Try Doorbell

Robert Brook and Lloyd Davis chanter on about technology, work, and getting old.

This is the podcast that inspired me to give it a go myself.

Go there now.

This Week in Google

Leo Laporte’s TWIT network is full of great podcasts, but the Google one is my favourite, mostly due to the co-hosts, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis, who really add insight to the weekly discussions about Google,
the cloud, mobile, social media and more.

Go there now.

The New Disruptors

A great podcast featuring weekly interviews with people doing new, creative things in new, creative ways. Hosted by the ace tech journalist Glenn Fleishman.

Go there now.

Cmd+Space

Myke Hurley chats every week to someone interesting who does interesting things. What can I say? I just like interview style podcasts.

Go there now.

In Our Time

Something a bit different – Radio 4’s In Our Time is just wonderful. Taking a different, often rather esoteric, topic every week, Melvyn Bragg teases a bunch of academics and experts for 45 edutaining minutes.

Go there now.

It would be great to hear what you make of these podcasts! Also, any crackers out there I ought to know about?

Problogging

I’m hugely envious of folks like Shawn Blanc and Ben Thompson. Their job is their blogs! How lucky is that?

This year I’ve really got into the content-producing swing of things – dunno if you’ve noticed. With this blog settled down and at home on WordPress.com, my newsletter working nicely thanks to Goodbits, the podcast rumbling along nicely on Libsyn and my Pinboard bookmarks providing even more stuff for people to look at if they need it, the tech and workflow is all slotting together very nicely.

It would be fantastic to be able to just focus on this content creation an curation work. It’s what I really love doing. Figuring a way to make it sustainable though is not easy.

Shawn and Ben both have membership schemes. Their core blogging is available for free, but extra bits – including content via email and podcasts – are members only. Members have to pay a certain amount to get access to it all.

This is a great way of doing things, but you need people willing to pay for your content.

Sponsorship is another way of doing things. John Gruber’s Daring Fireball does this, with the blog’s RSS feed being sponsored every week by a tech company wanting to reach his (many) readers. Gruber charges $9,500 per week for this sponsorship. Wowza!

The other option I guess is what I currently do, which is to use the content creation as a way of promoting my consulting work. The downside of this is that a) the blogging etc is a means rather than an end; and b) that I have to leave the house now and again.

Maybe I should just stop being lazy!

cloudHQ – fantastic cloud syncing tool

I’ve just found a tool that is making some of my biggest Google woes go away!

It’s called cloudHQ, and it’s really cool. You give it access to your cloud storage accounts – such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Evernote and so on; and it enables you to transfer files between them – whether on a one-off basis or as a continuous synchronisation.

You can also add details of more than one account for the same service, which is dead handy.

There is a free trial, and if all you are doing are one-off transfers you might get away with just using that. I’ve signed up for a Pro account which gives me unlimited data transfers, so I can leave it whirring away in the background.

Here is what I am using it for at the moment:

  1. Transferring all the files in my old Google Drive account into my new one (this was one of my biggest headaches!)
  2. Copying all the photos I have in Dropbox into Google Drive (which I can then make accessible in Google+ and on the photo gallery app on my phone)
  3. Copying all the notes I have in Evernote into a folder on Google Drive as a backup

Here’s a video explaining it better than I can.

Hurrah for cloudHQ!

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