I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Likeminds 2010 – First thoughts and reflections « Carl’s Notepad – Carl's views on the Likeminds conference.
• ParticipationCamp – Advancing public participation in government by connecting government managers and staff, public engagement experts, online tool developers, and citizens. – "ParticipationCamp is an unconference that aims to advance public participation in government by connecting government managers and staff, public engagement experts, online tool developers, and citizens."
• Unpacking the world of digital in government at Helpful Technology – A great post from Steph, with some brilliant discussion in the comments.
• App My State – Premier of Victoria – State of Victoria in Australia asks residents for their ideas.
• Staff at child maintenance agency shun computers and turn to pen and paper – "Computers keyboards are being pushed to one side as staff at the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission turn to pen and paper to complete claims that the IT system cannot cope with."
• RSA – Technology in a Cold Climate – "Technology in a Cold Climate aims to engender a greater understanding among the technology sector and policy makers about the role that technologies could play in meeting the UK’s ambitions and challenges."
• The Open Government Dilemma « The Envisioners – "Think about the challenge faced by data.gov.uk – superb solution, but who actually _owns_ it?"
• Department for Work and Pensions CTO reveals the power of crowd sourcing in government – Great stuff from James Gardner, aka @bankervision
• Why the EU Keeps Failing on E-Government – "Although I’m all for good practice exchange, what surprises me is the fact that “e-government” is associated to “wireless broadband”, as if practitioners in those two areas were the same or had to have a particularly strong link with each other."
• Home | Evaluation Trust – "The Evaluation Trust is a well respected community development agency with skills in capacity building."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• eGov AU: If you are a communications professional who chooses not to use social media, will you have a job in ten years? – "If you don't use social media, how can you critically assess its comparative worth as a communications tool? How can you help your employer avoid and rebound from embarrassing social media mistakes?"
• Open Government Ideas Look All the Same: Are You Surprised? – Potential problems with Gov agencies asking the public for ideas at the same time: "Wow, twelve different agencies – including the GSA that offered the IdeaScale tool to other agencies – have the exact same most popular idea, which – as you would expect – has been submitted by the same person."
• NESTA – Mass Localism – "…an approach by which central and local government can encourage widespread, high quality local responses to big challenges."
• Nodalities » Blog Archive » Linked Data Visualisation Launched at Prime Minister’s Conference – "This is only a start, but already this project has demonstrated that publishing data as Linked Data in a queryable store can stimulate innovation beyond the ubiquitous demo mashup towards real full-blown applications that can deliver commercial benefit."
• The future of Australian banking – BankerVision – "Clever institutions – including one in the UK – are already starting to get the fact that the best strategic option is to integrate their stuff into things customers really care about, not be the centre of the universe themselves. If nothing else, it removes them from the falseness of their traditional approaches to customers."
• Giraffe Forum » People are not always the problem – "The end objective of technology should be to extend the capabilities of people, not to replace them. Sure, as technology drives efficiency some people will lose out, but that should not be an objective in and of itself. The objective should be to become more efficient and deliver a better service to the customer."
• Rewired Culture – 27th March « Lost ConsCIOusness – Looks like a cracking day – good mix of hackday and unconference
• Federal Agency Ideascale Dashboard – "To satisfy the Open Government Directive agencies are soliciting your ideas on how to make them more transparent, participatory, collaborative and innovative."
• The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – WSJ.com – "It's fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom."
• Building Democracy: Evaluation Report – Evaluation of the MoJ Building Democracy innovation competition.
• Making a podcast – some notes and observations – Roo Reynolds – Wonderful guide to recording, editing and publishing a podcast.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Typists in the Sky | Collaboration 2.0 | ZDNet.com – "The self controlled side of 2.0 computing can be very enabling and efficient for those who can organize themselves well for business and for pleasure, but collectively we are increasingly at the mercy of the lowest common denominator – time bandwidth hogging communicators."
• Why Do Governments Separate Open Data and Social Media Strategies? – "My meetings this week confirmed that most government organizations keep their open data initiatives and their social media strategies separated. Often there are different groups dealing with those two topics, although they admittedly “interact”."
• Britain Loves Wikipedia – "Britain Loves Wikipedia is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest running in museums and cultural institutions across the UK through February. The aim is to increase the number of pictures available to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and to inspire new articles."
• 20 Great Talks on the Future of Information – Useful set of lectures
• Tool-up NGO-style – 20 web-based tools for daily working « BASIC CRAFT – Nice list of usable and easy to access online tools from @rossferg
• Digital citizens and democratic engagement – The Hansard Society – "[This report] shows that for Britons who are already online, the internet has made it easier to take part in civic and political activities and that half of them prefer to use the internet to take part in democratic life."
• Jelly! – Casual coworking is awesome. / CamJelly – "Jelly is a casual coworking event, where freelancers, home workers and people running small businesses meet up in order to get out of their normal space, meet some new people and work together in a social environment."
• The Google Exposure | Linux Journal – "Advertising is a bubble. If that's a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that's true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk."
• Google Apps Developer Blog – New blog for being hacking Google Apps.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Buzz by Brad Fitzpatrick from Buzz – How to add your blog's RSS feed to your Google Buzz stream (it's quite tricky)

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Buzz by Brad Fitzpatrick from Buzz – How to add your blog's RSS feed to your Google Buzz stream (it's quite tricky)
• Blogging and Facebook for councillors – "An increasing number of councillors now have blogs or use Facebook, so there is plenty of experience around and many good examples to emulate. In this article, seasoned 'blogger' Councillor Mary Reid offers you the benefit of her experience." via @pigsonthewing
• How to Send Blog Posts from Google Reader to Evernote « Evernote Blogcast – Nice simple tip for curating content between Reader and Evernote. I'm using this to gather items together that I want to write about in a single post of my own.
• 10 Unsung Collaboration Tools — Many of Them Free – GigaOM – "Most of us can rattle off the well-known applications that are available, but there are many targeted, useful collaboration apps that are more offbeat."
• Synctus – Multi-Master File Replication – Plug and play document sharing across different locations without the cloud, from Manchester based startup.
• Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – "Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago."
• Join the Conversation for Free! | blueKiwi software – There is now a free, if limited, version of BlueKiwi, the collaboration and community software used in a pilot at Devon County Council. Worth checking out.
• Why Your Boss Hates Facebook – Is security considered a greater threat than productivity loss? Maybe. What about bandwidth, though?
• Cloud Culture is now available to download: launch and debate at the ICA tonight « Counterpoint – Interesting PDF booklet from Charles Leadbeater
• When failure is not an option – BankerVision – "Failure that occurs at any point before delivery starts is “good failure”, and in fact, is something that innovators should develop competencies in if they want to stay in business."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• WordPress Mobile Pack « WordPress Plugins – "The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog."
•   A digital engagement framework adapted for local government by Michele Ide-Smith – "I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement."
• Trackle.com – Find It. Track It. Share It. – Trackle looks a really good option as an online monitoring tool.
• TeaCamp – A blog to help folk keep track of the regular government tea drinking meetups.
• Why do councils still use Internet Explorer 6? | Learning Pool Blog – "the web has moved on substantially since then and, given that Microsoft has released two excellent versions of the browser since, I think its time for local government to turn its back on an outdated, insecure and slow browser."
• Local knowledge is everything – BankerVision – "We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers. Well, we’re not."
• Cloud Culture: any new threats? « Perfect Path – "My personal experience with Tuttle has been that the network is much stronger and more robust than we imagine. Whenever it get’s a push against it, it either repels invaders or morphs into something similar enough to still be Tuttle, but different enough to survive."
• Innovation unlimited – Enterprise and Industry – European Commission – Interesting use of a blog from the EU's innovation unit.
• So your council wants to blog? – "Having said that blogs are mundane, there are still not many examples of blogs written by local government officers (as opposed to councillors or community activists)."
• Communicating Cohesion: Evaluating Local Authority Communication Strategies – "The report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation into local authority communications, from the perspective of promoting community cohesion. The findings reinforce the need for effective communications to address perceptions by some groups that they are losing out to others and the need for local authorities to take a strategic approach to communications that needs to involve not just the council staff and elected members, but the community itself."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• A Policy Dialogue Platform | Promoting Better Governance – "As part of the CIO Series 2009-10, Dave Mansfield answered questions on role of ICT in local government- the benefits, the challenges as well as what the future holds."
• Repping the UK Scene | Huddle Up – Huddle.net’s Official Collaboration Blog – Interesting! "Our entry was an over-ambitious and unwieldy affair: we wanted to synchronise content between different instances of Sharepoint, each behind their own corporate firewall, using the collaboration features of Huddle to provide the heavy lifting and identity federation."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Newspapers v councils « Tom Calver’s musings – "And behind the whole local paper argument though there seems to be a staggering arrogance. These owners and their journalists apparently believe that their papers have a right to exist that is independent of their readers. Even if nobody reads it, the very existence of the paper is a Good Thing."
• eLearn: Best Practices – Tips for Effective Webinars – "Giving an effective webinar requires some presentation redesign and technology skills that you don't necessarily need in a face-to-face presentation. A great speaker in a face-to-face environment can easily crash and burn in a webinar setting if he or she isn't prepared for the unique challenges and needs of that environment."
• SOCIAL MEDIA: Your EIGHT step guide to getting started… « The Dan Slee Blog – Dan Slee is a credit to Walsall Council. "Here’s some thoughts on how to go about turning your organisation into something fit for the 21st century."
• Google Reader (1000+) – The event is about bringing local innovators together for a day to develop prototypes of online tools that tackle challenges about accessing local public sector services online – basically looking to make local residents’ lives easier through better online tools. And the things the event creates should be easily reused in other local areas throughout the UK.
• Jailbrake – "Jailbrake is a competition to find and support great ideas that could break the cycle of youth offending using simple web and mobile tools."
• Rocketbox – Powerful e-mail search for Apple Mail – "Rocketbox is a powerful, new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app. It's never been faster or easier to find what you need."
• HipChat – Private chat for your company or team – "HipChat brings better-than-enterprise instant messaging to your organization. Get more done with chat rooms, file sharing, and searchable chat history. It’s a more productive and fun way to work."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.