Bookmarks for August 11th through August 18th

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.

Bookmarks for March 16th through March 18th

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.

Ofqual’s new commentable report

I’ve being doing some work over the past few months with Ofqual, the regulator of qualifications in the UK. Much of the work has been around how they could use social web technology to work better internally, but I’ve also been advising on external online engagement stuff too.

One strand of that work has now become public, in the form of the consultation on the Chief Regulator’s Report, made commentable thanks to Steph’s Commentariat WordPress theme.

Chief Regulator's Report, Ofqual

The lovely design was done by the internal web team at Ofqual, lead fearlessly by Phil McAllister.

I’m really pleased with this, because I see it as being the result of some real digital enabling. I didn’t really do anything to make this happen, other than planting the seed of the idea in Phil’s head, and then providing some web space so the site could be hosted quickly and easily, and doing the initial WordPress set up.

That’s all that Phil’s team needed to get going. Had they been left to try and procure some web hosting through traditional routes, this site may never have seen the light of day. So I’m pleased to have helped a new, young organisation step out into the world of online engagement, however small my personal contribution.

And once again, well done to Phil and his team for an excellent implementation of Commentariat!

Now, this is nice

Steph has posted about the work he has been doing getting the Power of Information Taskforce report online for interested folk to comment on it before it gets published. It’s a lovely piece of work:

It is in fact a new theme, not the usual CommentPress which has been lying dormant for quite a while. As Steph says:

I think this is a small step forward from CommentPress and CoComment in terms of accessibility, Javascript independence and browser compatibility. It’s also marginally less laborious and slightly more purpose-built than the approach Ofcom took to their commentable consultations. And hopefully its muted style is slightly more pleasing to aesthetes than tools like CommentOnThis.

Best of all, the theme has been made available for other people to use – you can grab it from here.

This post is clearly about medium rather than message, so I’ll comment on the report itself some other time 😉