culture – Page 8 – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for April 25th through April 30th

April 30, 2010

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

More plugins for securing your WordPress install – Useful guide for making WP a bit more impregnable.
Introducing the Hybrid Organisation –
Hacking UK Politics with IBM Middleware: open data, mashups, and uh… WebSphere – Cool looking mashup by guys at IBM described by James Governor
CIOs Brainstorm About Government 2.0: Good Ideas But Not Bold Enough – "So, why do government people insist to “build something” with web 2.0 rather than realizing that in most cases people self-organize and select the channel they want to use or the community they want to belong to? Why do they focus so much on “citizens” and so little on “employees”?"
Government Online | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project – Interesting statistics from the US on general e-government stuff.
W3 Total Cache – "The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. "
Social on the Outside needs Social Business on the Inside :: Blog :: Headshift – "The focus of my talk was the idea that hanging shiny social media baubles on the cold, hard external walls of a corporate organisation runs the risk of creating a false brand promise unless this work has strong internal underpinnings in the form of social business structures that can do something about the noise, insights and feedback that outbound communications generate."
Web 2.0 training materials – A fantastic resource from the Scottish Government Library Services. Great material, and a wonderful example of sharing.
CASE STUDY: How Walsall museum is cooler than Ben Stiller – More great work and great blogging from Dan Slee and Walsall Council.
WW2History.com – Launching 4th May, 2010 – "A multimedia resource on the most devastating conflict in history, brought to you by award winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees."

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.

Productivity, responsiveness and lighter weight

April 28, 2010

I rather like this, from Gartner’s Mark McDonald:

While the future will require IT to deliver enterprise specific strategies and initiatives there are a few considerations to keep mind:

Productivity is different than efficiency and those differences matter

It is better for IT to be responsive rather than just being “agile”

Leveraging the capabilities of lighter weight technologies and how they impact IT

Bookmarks for April 11th through April 16th

April 16, 2010

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

A New Approach to Printing – “a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”
Governments and Citizens: You Don’t Own Your Tweets – This is a really interesting piece on ownership of online content.
Beauty is the new must-have feature – “I’m predicting that we’ll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we’ll be rubbish at it when it happens.”
Follow Finder by Google – “Follow Finder analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow.”
Enterprise 2.0 and improved business performance – “Despite growing evidence, which I’ve presented here and elsewhere, there still remains for many people a real question about the overall ability of social software to improve how organizations get things done.”
calibre – E-book management – Really handy (for a Kindle owner, anyway) open source, cross platform ebook conversion tool.
Why does government struggle with innovation? – “If innovation is becoming a core attribute required by government organisations, merely to keep up with the rate of change in society and the development of new ways to deliver services and fulfil public needs, perhaps we need to rewrite some of the rulebook, sacrificing part of our desire for stability in return for greater change.”
The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation – “There are many candidates for the biggest obstacle to innovation. You could try lack of management support, no employee initiative, not enough good ideas, too many good ideas but no follow-through just for starters. My nominee for The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation is: Inertia”
Lichfield District Council – Open Election Data Project Case Study – “An early adopter Lichfield District Council has been actively sharing a range of local data for some time. In March 2010 the Council was the first authority to make its local election results openly available as part of the Open Election Data Project.”
Google Docs Gets More Realtime; Adds Google Drawings To The Mix – Me likey!
YouTube – SearchStories’s Channel – Make your own Google search story video – like in the Superbowl ad. Cute.

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.

Recruit the internet-savvy

April 15, 2010

The Telegraph had an interesting article this week: MI5 dumps spies who can’t use Facebook and Twitter:

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the Parliamentary subcommittee on counter-terrorism, told the Daily Mail: “As terrorism changes, counter-terrorism officers have to adapt to keep up.

‘Our enemies use every available method to attack including using technology. We have to be aware of the imminent threats of cyber attacks and the old generation of MI5 have to be completely comfortable using computers and the latest technology.”

You might not be surprised to learn that I’d recommend hiring internet-savvy candidates, no matter what position it is you are trying to fill. Think about it – what makes a good member of a team?

I reckon that the behaviour and attitude that the internet encourages are things that make for great employees:

curiosity
generosity
openness
cooperation

Of course, if you do hire people like this, you’ll need to provide them with a working environment in which they’ll want to stay.

“Always hire the internet-savvy” is a similar message to what the 37 Signals guys say in Getting Real about good writers:

That’s because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

Mary blogged about recruitment recently, referring to a speech by the American academic Dennis Kimbro. Some attitudes about this issue in local government, as Mary notes, are worrying.

Jason Fried of 37 Signals (the guys who make cool software like Basecamp and Highrise, and the great books Rework and Getting Real) talks on this video on why interruptions are the enemy of getting stuff done.

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