An online notebook
An online notebook
The latest in the seemingly unstoppable movement of localgovcamps is happening today, in Cheltenham. It’s subject specific, and is going to be all about project management and that sort of thing.
Great work by the team at Cheltenham Borough Council in throwing this together: Jon Hyde, David Wenban and Fiona Legge, amongst others.
Learning Pool is proud to be sponsoring the event, and you can follow all the action on Twitter via the ppmlgc tag.
I had a lovely time on Saturday at Barcamb, a techie unconference in Cambridge. Quite a bit techier, actually, than I’m used to – but that offered a different perspective on things, which was rather nice.
It also meant catching up with some friends, like Mark Cheverton, Matt Wood and Simon Jones – and bumping into new people, like Barcamb organisers Vero Pepperell and Lee Theobold and cool hacker types like Gareth Rushgrove.
Another one of those new people was Claire Sale, who works for NetSquared, the rather cool US-based organisation that “enables social benefit organisations to leverage the tools of the social web”. That makes her a colleague of the marvellously energetic Amy Sample Ward, which is a jolly good thing.
One of the things Amy has been doing in London is setting up a NetSquared network, where “Social changemakers and technological forerunners come together at Net Tuesday events to mix, swap stories and ideas, [and] build new relationships”. Claire is hoping to get something similar going in Cambridge.
There is already a Meetup page setup, where people interested in attending, and maybe helping out, can get together and get stuff done. I’m guessing this will take a similar form to the London group – let’s just get people in a room together first, and then worry about what we should be doing.
Net2Camb seems a decent tag to apply to blog stuff, tweets and other online material to track activity and conversations.
Hampshire County Council’s Head of IT Jos Creese is the President of Socitm for the next 12 months, and if this quote is anything to go by, he seems an ideal man for the job:
IT professionals must carve out a role as agents of change, helping to re-shape the face of public services. This means involvement in policy formulation and service redesign, not technology. It also means taking risks and being at the forefront of change, rather than keeping busy in the data centre.
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.
You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.
In the second DavePress podcast I chat to Andrew Beeken of the City of Lincoln Council about the new open data site he has just launched, data.lincoln.gov.uk.
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/davepress/DavePressEp2.mp3]If you can’t, or don’t want to, use the flash player, you can download the .mp3 instead or subscribe with iTunes.
If you have any feedback – or volunteer to be a participant in a podcast, please do so in the comments below, or emailpodcast@davepress.net.
For those that want to know, here’s how the podcast is produced.
Excellent stuff from Andrew McAfee:
I think serendipity is part of what underlies Metcalfe’s Law and a big part of the explanation for Eric Raymond’s insight that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.’ Knowledge workers and their organizations should be doing everything possible to increase opportunities for serendipity. This means searching broadly for information, narrating work so that others can become aware of it, asking questions to the biggest possible audience without presupposing who might have the answers, and generally contributing to and drawing from the biggest possible digital commons. This is what Enterprise 2.0 should be all about.
Following up on my earlier post on good things to look for in people when you are hiring – Recruit the internet-savvy – I picked up on some useful notes whilst at TechCrunch‘s GeeknRolla on recruiting into startups, which I think are useful for pretty much any organisation. I also think it’s interesting to think how public services can learn from the culture of startup businesses, including around recruitment.
The talk was by Pete Smith from Songkick, which is a service that lets you track all sorts of information about your favourite live music acts, such as upcoming concerts, videos and recordings.
Here’s the notes:
These thoughts chime in with some activity coming out of the IDeA with regard to talent management, recruit and workforce planning. In the current financial climate, there is a lot of talk of cuts and redundancies which has the potential to be incredibly damaging.
So, the IDeA have launched an online resource, on ‘organisational redesign‘ with some useful case studies and guidance. A thriving community of practice also exists too (with various layers of sign-up required).
I honestly believe that local authorities could make massive improvements to their efficiency and levels of service if they recruited better, and made better use of the talent they already have. I consider myself to be a great example of the failings of local government workforce management. Some of the things that are important, I think, are:
The IDeA are also organising an event in Birmingham on 19th May, called ‘Designing a fit for the future organisation‘. I’m going, because it sounds pretty interesting. Hope to see others there.
Quite a few people – at least those that read this blog and others like it – are comfortable with the idea of mashups, the activity of taking data from one source, and combining it with one or more others to create something useful and interesting.
Often this happens on maps, but of course it doesn’t have to.
One potential application of this sort of technology which doesn’t get discussed much, certainly in the public services context, is enterprise mashups, in other words applying these techniques within the organisation, behind the firewall. So, taking a set of data or statistics from one department and mashing it up with another.
I’d read about enterprise mashups before, but the idea didn’t really catch on until I saw Bill Ive’s post about JackBe, a vendor providing a platform for organisations to do this stuff. Here’s a video giving an example of how JackBe can be used:
I certainly remember my days as a Business Analyst at a county council where I spent days taking information from one source and having to reformat it to make it play nicely with another, usually in Excel. Having a tool like this available would have made life much easier.
Here’s a whitepaper explaining all this in more detail (PDF warning).
(Obviously, there are other providers of enterprise mashup platforms and not just JackBe, it’s just that I wasn’t looking at their websites when I was writing this post.)
I wrote about the Transformed by You project, run jointly between Kent and Medway Councils, here. By all accounts it was a great event, and thanks to the great social reporting efforts of David Wilcox, we can all get a feel for how it went.
The evaluation of the process has been published openly, and makes for an interesting read:
Great that this stuff is being shared out in the open! You can follow further progress on the project, and innovation generally in Kent, on the iNews blog.
Innovation in government is a topic that I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about recently. More soon, when I get round to it.
I had an enjoyable day yesterday at TechCrunch Europe‘s GeeknRolla event – a conference for techy startups. There was lots of discussion about what the next big thing might be (no-one really knows) and how to get funding from venture capitalists (it’s really hard).
One of the most interesting and useful sessions from my perspective was the one on mobile platforms, by Ewan McLeod of Mobile Industry Review.
Ewan really put into perspective the mobile landscape in terms of who is using what – with an emphasis on the fact that the iPhone isn’t the only platform developers should be concentrating on. Nokia, and their Symbian operating system, dominates. The problem is that it’s harder and more expensive to develop for, and doesn’t offer the great user experience that the iPhone offers.
For public services, where accessing as many people as possible is the major issue, platforms other than the fashionable ones need to be seriously considered when developing native mobile applications.
I took some rough notes during the talk, which I have reproduced below with some minor edits for spelling and tidiness. A much better written summary of the session is on TechCrunch itself, and I have embedded the slides too, which are full of goodness.
My notes