cms – Page 3 – Dave Briggs

Sharing and flexibility

September 19, 2010

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 handy. Stephen and Jimmy writing their posts, me reading them, has saved you thousands of pounds. Direct cause and effect.

Having the flexibility to embed stuff is awesome. Insist on it next time you buy a CMS. Hats off to the guys at Eduserv for really coming through for us on this one. We couldn’t put pages together like this and this and this without it.

The growing availability of embeddable stuff is way cool. I’m excited about what else we might be able to achieve without dev work – like page ratings using Bazaarvoice and forums using Talki.

We all need to think differently now. Few things we might want our website to do are going to be unique to us. Gov webbies, and suppliers of government web services, need to adapt and thoroughly check out 3rd party plugins before embarking on any kind of jiggery-bespokery. Why pay for our own learning curve when others have already been through it?

My take (which pretty much repeats what Neil has said:

People sharing stuff via blogs is good and has measurable impact.
In whatever you do, being flexible and open means you can make the most of developments in technology, or whatever.

Bookmarks for June 3rd through June 7th

June 7, 2010

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

Armchair Auditor – Nice clean and simple example of what can be done with open government spending data by @adrianshort
Supreme Court’s untendered website cost revealed – "You need to ask yourself whether £360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result – with better functionality – for 95% less."
Why I’m fed up of talking about social media, really – "Sure it’s great that lots of councils are interested in social media and what it can do for their communications. But what is really starting to annoy me is that too many councils are asking the wrong questions."
Zotero | Home – "Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources." – via @jjn1
Local Data wiki – Great idea to create a wiki explaining opendata to local government types.
Centre for Digital Citizenship – "The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area."
Yammer Introduces Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Integration – Potentially significant move.
So You Want to Switch to Android…One Man’s iPhone to Nexus One Migration – "Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users."
Publishing itemised local authority expenditure – advice for comment | data.gov.uk – "The Prime Minister has made a specific commitment that new items of local government spending over £500 be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011" – and here's how to do it.
Good and bad transparency – Great post from Steph on the implications of opening up government data.

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.

Bookmarks for April 30th through May 14th

May 14, 2010

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

Should the Public Sector pay for Content Management Systems? « Carl’s Notepad – [with open source] "You will still need to consider the integration aspects but open source products are far more likely to integrate (openness is key) then the big supplier products (no motivation to integrate)."
Office 2010: the SharePoint factor – "The simple conclusion then is that to make sense of Office 2010 you need SharePoint 2010. The snag is that SharePoint is not something to roll out casually. Although it has a huge number of interesting features, it is also complex and easy to break. "
No Overall Control – a Future State of ICT – "To really address the gap between people in ICT and people who work in the Business (people outside of ICT) you actually need to start moving the competencies that IT Professionals have into the Business."
The Fate of the Semantic Web – "While many survey participants noted that current and emerging technologies are being leveraged toward positive web evolution in regard to linking data, there was no consensus on the technical mechanisms and human actions that might lead to the next wave of improvements – nor how extensive the changes might be."
tecosystems » I Love WordPress But… – "the reasons we self-host our WordPress instances are being eliminated at an accelerating rate"
Meatball Wiki – "Meatball is a community of active practitioners striving to teach each other how to organize people using online tools."
Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services – ReadWriteCloud – "Amazon is quietly pursuing the multi-billion dollar federal cloud computing market, intensifying an already fast accelerating sales and marketing effort by Google, Microsoft and a host of others."
What’s Wrong With CSS – "Most of all, what I've learned from this exercise in site theming is that CSS is kind of painful. I fully support CSS as a (mostly) functional user interface Model-View-Controller. But even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice."
WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM – "People can enter a contact form on your site, and the lead goes straight into Salesforce CRM: no more copy pasting lead info, no more missing leads: each and every one of them is in Salesforce.com for you to follow up."
A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Examples – Nice resource. Some great examples in here.
Headshift Projects: Projects by Sector – Nice collection of social software case studies.

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.

Bookmarks for March 21st through March 29th

March 30, 2010

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

Would Anyone Ever Say that Open Government Isn’t Great? – "Let’s not demonize good old e-government and let’s not overhype open government or government 2.0. Because what they have both in common is the willingness to help government become better."
Bristol City Council – blogging our web presence development work – "Us folks here at Bristol City Council have decided that as we continue to develop our web presence, in support of our wider business objectives, it’d make sense if we listened to the collective wisdom of our local digital community."
3 principles of innovative organisations – 100% Open – "As if we needed reminding, this exponential increase in connectivity and information sharing is fundamentally changing the way organisations operate and innovate."
Posting information online could preempt FOIA requests (3/18/10) — GovExec.com – "Taking advantage of technology and preemptively posting frequently requested information online could help agencies address new Freedom of Information Act queries and tackle backlogs"
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – "I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world."
How Not To Tender For e-Consultation Software | Delib Blog – "This is an issue that’s vexed us for some years here, but having just seen the most ridiculous tender process we’ve ever come across, we really have to say something for the good of all. After all, if we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it."
Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts’ Law – "If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability — what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on? Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?"
Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers – A Phd dissertation on blogging in the workplace. Not read it yet.
my_$publicservice.org – "What really matters in the end is that we listen, and having listened respond and improve."
Gordon Brown and Tim Berners Lee: Back to the Future? – "The result may be for the UK to remain stuck into its ambition to be seen as a leader in e-government (and now government 2.0) without ever really making it."
Public Sector Transformation Summit by Michele Ide-Smith – Great post with an awesome embedded slidedeck.

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.

Bookmarks for March 13th through March 15th

March 16, 2010

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

HR in the 21st Century – Collection of very interesting posts and thoughts on HR in the age of Enterprise 2.0
Opinion Space – "The U.S. Department of State is interested in your perspectives and input on a series of important foreign policy questions. "Opinion Space" is a new discussion forum designed to engage participants from around the world."
Nextgov – Federal technology news, best practices, and web 2.0 tools – Looks an interesting resource.
When It Comes to Open Government, Nobody is Perfect – "The journey toward transparency, participation and openness is not one in which government should travel alone."
100% Open – Interesting looking new body to emerge out of NESTA – will be watching this!
Under construction: behind the scenes of a government website (soft) launch – Great post from Neil on the soft launch of a new site for BIS – which will save money and hopefully be adaptable to any changes ahead.
WordPress › Use Google Libraries – This looks very clever indeed.
Forrester Blogs – Forrester's blog network has had a bit of a makeover – loads of good stuff in here.
Top 10 Google Apps Marketplace Apps – Useful list of the better additional apps you can get from the Google Apps marketplace.
ShiftSpace – "ShiftSpace is an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web."

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.

Load more posts!