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

• UKGovCamp as the future | The Democratic Society – "I suspect – I hope – we will look back on days like Saturday as a time of shared preparation for something much bigger: an agreeable Enlightenment salon heralding the harder, more disappointing work of social transformation. "
• Barnet Council FixMyStreet – Barnet Council team up with FixMyStreet – cool.
• Online basics – Online basics is a free, easy to use course that will help you get started using computers and the internet.
• CPSRenewal.ca: Column: When Social Location Sharing Meets Government Services – "Where location sharing services like Foursquare and governments collide will most likely be in the area of service delivery. More specifically, Foursquare (or whatever location sharing service rivals it) will be a key social space for any government agency that delivers service via a service center."
• Lotus Puts the Labs to Work: On Innovation – Interesting stuff coming out of IBM, beautifully written up by @monkchips
• WordPress Foundation – "The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software."
• Stretching Resources 3: Using new technology | Opinion | Local Government Chronicle – "It is the right time to be thinking creatively and using modern, user-centered technology to make it possible for public sector workers to meet the demands of their jobs in as streamlined a way as possible."
• Lotus Knows, But Do You Know Lotus? – "Lotus is able to deliver what Google Wave fails to address: providing a solution that improves personal productivity without forcing a change in work behavior."
• The benefits of blogging – Great post by Julia Chandler on DfID's blogging experience
• Can We Categorize Participation and Collaboration? – "I thought it would be useful to distinguish two types of participation and two types of collaboration"

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.

• The Governance Ladder « Carl’s Notepad – "The key thing for me in thinking this way is that i don’t believe that Governance should be seen as something which is rigid and fixed in an organisation. I believe that we need to start adapting our Governance to the circumstances and providing a greater level of education, awareness and information so that people (not the processes) can make better decisions in the first place."
• REWORK: The new business book from 37signals. – The new business book from 37signals.
• Defra, UK – UK Location – Nice new WordPress microsite for Defra by Simon Dickson
• co-operative News – Co-ops can help transform public services – report – "The Innovation Unit, a London-based independent social enterprise dedicated to supporting the third sector, has published an independent ‘think piece’ — The Engagement Ethic — outlining the potential for co-operatives and mutuals to help transform public services. "
• Gov 2.0: Gov 2.0 Hero: Dominic Campbell – Much like in the US, the majority of digital engagement in the UK has been about a race to develop shiny new websites and get government agencies on Twitter and the whole spectrum of social tools. The focus has predominantly been on better PR and communications which has indeed led to some improvements, but even then nowhere near as rapidly as you might hope.
• NESTA Connect: The internal challenge of open innovation – "The open innovation professionals whom i've worked with who are most successful work just as hard, if not even harder, to network within their organisations to find the right people to be able to make a deal happen once they've sourced one externally. And tools like twitter are, in part, so exciting to me because they form a wonderful shortcut into organisations bypassing existing channels or opening up entirely new channels of communication that didn't exist previously. "
• Showing a better way – honestlyreal – "And as far as I’m aware, the fundamental problem with innovation in public services is this confusion between what constitutes ideas, and what constitutes service implementation."
• Backupify :: Secure Online Backup and Archiving for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress – "Your online accounts contain important information. Don’t risk losing any of it. Sign up for our online account backup and you will never have to worry about losing a thing."
• How to crowd source an IT strategy – BankerVision – "Big organisations are challenged when you ask them for quick decisions."
• How To Build An Online Community: The Ultimate List Of Resources – FeverBee – "This is a collection of my favourite and most popular posts from the last two years. It should give you a great overview about both the strategy any the process of creating an online community from scratch." Fabulous.
• Cisco’s Top 10 Predictions for 2010 – "Some leadership teams will view 2010 as an opportunity to pull ahead of their competition by investing in a collaboration architecture that will further improve their team’s productivity"

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.

• Departmental Dialogue Index – "This research project has identified and developed a diagnostic tool, the Departmental Dialogue Index (DDI), that will allow Departments to better understand their propensity to engage with the public."
• Zengobi – Curio 6 – Interesting Mac mind mapping software
• Is listening neutral? | Podnosh – "The core piece of advice for any public service on how to make good use of social media is “learn to listen”. It’s the one part of the conversation that sometimes gets lost in the rush to publish."
• CPSRenewal.ca: Column: Risky Business: Deputy Minister or Bust – "I cannot even recall the number of times I have been told that what I am doing on this blog, via twitter and other social media is incredibly "risky". I get the impression that many people assume that my risk tolerance is higher than the average public servant, and perhaps they are right. However if I am indeed more tolerant of risk, I would argue that it is because the way in which I frame risk is markedly different than how it is typically framed in the bureaucracy. "
• Government 2.0: Communication and Engagement Are On a Collision Course – "In essence, in gov 2.0 terms an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy. The former chooses and controls channels, while the latter joins somebody else’s channels The former determines rules of engagement, the latter follows somebody else’s rules. The former assumes that citizens reach out to government, the latter is based on government reaching out to communities and groups."
• How low is the common denominator? | Public Strategist – "Do brilliant ideas have to have polarised responses, or can they be brilliant and inclusive?"
• The Power of Technology to Transform Government – Steve Ballmer on Open Government: "I’m encouraged by this forum. It’s another strong signal that leaders at the very highest level of the federal government recognize that information technology has the potential to transform government by making it more efficient, more effective and more responsive."
• We Can Work It Out – NLGN – We argue that democratically elected councils must sit at the heart of a complex ecosystem of services and must develop their role in order to ensure greater co-ordination of support for people at the frontline. Skills quangos at the regional spatial tier should be streamlined to cut out the complexity of the current system, and local authorities must take the lead in commissioning welfare-to-work programmes from the corridors of Whitehall.
• Space Of Waste – Yay for govbloggers! "Hello world! My name is Lucy Toman, and I recently started working in Municipal Waste Management in Defra."
• WordPress official user interface mailing list – Just that: WordPress now has a dedicated mailing list to discuss issues around the user experience
• Understanding participation: A literature review — Pathways Through Participation – The review brings together different bodies of literature on participation, including literature on community development, volunteering, public participation, social movements, everyday politics and ethical consumption.

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.

• Cisco 2009 3rd Party External Social Media Research Findings – "Cisco release the results of a third-party global study today, designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally."
• Rationalizing the E2.0, SCRM, social business discussion – "Finally, when thinking about E2.0/SCRM, pay attention to the way in which organizational change occurs in the context of nuanced cultures. Don’t be constrained by one or other theory simply because it makes for an attractive sounding buzz phrase. Without that, much of what passes for this new way of thinking will be lost."
• Governmentontheweb – Home Page – "This site is dedicated to improving knowledge and understanding of e-government and the impact of web-based technologies on government."
• Bright Side of Government : What Social Middleware means for Government – "Social Middleware unlocks the potential of open applications by adding a layer of enterprise security, control, visibility and data retention. In the process you turn public platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into enterprise-grade channels for engagement, communication and collaboration." via @hubmum
• BBC News – Computer game gives taste of life as an MP – Computer game gives taste of life as an MP
• Open Government/Government 2.0 @ Microsoft – Microsoft's toolkit for US government departments needing to be compliant with the open government directive.
• Which Flip should I buy? | Podnosh – A cheap-video-camera buying guide from Nick Booth
• Britainthinks – "Britainthinks is an independent space where the opinions of the British public can be publicly expressed."
• Tina Daunt: The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet – "Kubrick, the template that launched millions of beautiful blogs and helped transform the Internet, is expected to be retired mid-year as the default theme for the popular WordPress blogging platform."
• Intel AppUp(SM) Center Beta – An app store for netbooks, apparently

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.

• Spiceworks – Free Network Monitoring Software for Network Management – "Spiceworks is the complete network management & monitoring, helpdesk, PC inventory & software reporting solution to manage Everything IT in small and medium businesses."
• A first step towards freeing London’s data | London DataStore – "Welcome to the prototype Datastore for London. This is where we’ll be releasing all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge."
• Socialcast – Enterprise Microblogging, Social Networking and Activity Streams – "Socialcast is a simple, secure collaboration tool that helps employees communicate in real-time."
• Shared service delivery in local government | Government and Public Sector | Deloitte UK – "The concept of shared services in not new – they have been implemented in the public and private sectors for some time now, but there are few success stories in local government to date."
• Government Portals Keep Struggling – "…mimicking a government web site or portal on Facebook won’t make it any more successful than its traditional counterpart"

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

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

• A Democracy of Netbooks – "We have produced a democracy of netbooks. And the geek in me can't wait to see what happens next. "
• Thingamy with ESME points to where enterprise 2.0 is heading – "I believe the combination is a big step forward for Sig's solution, as well as representing one of several approaches that signpost the direction of enterprise 2.0, or enterprise collaboration for 2010. It's all about linking collaboration to process."
• ESME – "enterprise microsharing in a process context"
• Legislation needed for local government to reduce costs by sharing back office functions – "Local authorities will not reduce costs and make significant savings by sharing back office functions without further government legislation, finds a new report. The obligatory introduction of regional or multi-local authority shared services would remove the need to build political consensus and address cultural resistance to the concept, says Deloitte."
• MPs’ Expenses Consultation – Great work by @harrym and team
• ongoing · Doing It Wrong – "The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups."
• BBC College of Journalism – Skills – Video Journalism – Tips on using video for journalism from the Beeb.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.