data – Page 4 – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for March 18th through March 20th

[Something is going wrong with this again. For some reason this hadn’t been posted before now.]

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

Embracing Government 2.0: Leading transformative change in the public sector (PDF) – PDF warning! Link to paper from Grant Thornton on gov 2.0 – some interesting case studies.
Government webpage for every citizen in the race to create a paperless society – Times Online – “All public services could be delivered online within four years under an ambitious pledge by Gordon Brown to create a paperless state and save billions of pounds”
What is eSpace? | NHS CFH eSpace – “eSpace is a community based online collaboration tool dedicated to improving healthcare and wellness by sharing knowledge and experiences of technology enabled change.” via @dominiccampbell
What Is Open Government For? – “It is quite clear that, depending on what is the primary driver to be “open”, the meaning of openness changes, as do the effort put on different aspects of an open government strategy and plan.”
Central government reorganisation squandering millions on IT – “More than £150m was spent on IT by government departments going through a process of restructuring but there is little evidence of any benefits, finds a new NAO report.”
Fake Experts – “It is possible that the most frustrating thing ever is to have to sit through meetings with people who have declared that they’re experts, and then discover that they aren’t.”
The problem of incentives in knowledge work – “I’m struggling with the issue of incentives in organizations trying to promote improved knowledge management and more effective use of new collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, and the like.”
Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative? – Interesting – never mind the tech, how does video fit with the ethos of Wikipedia?
The Problem with Big Data – “He who has the most data wins. Right?”

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.

comment.ofqual.gov.uk – Lovely commentable document style consultations from Ofqual
MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy – Institute for Government – "Influencing behaviour through public policy explores how behaviour change theory can help meet current policy challenges, such as how to reduce crime, tackle obesity, or ensure environmental sustainability."
How Not to Run an IT Project: A Case Study – Well worth a read.
Open Election Data project – "A new project to help local government open up their election results"
MIT TechTV – The Future of Government/Citizen Engagement – "From the Mayor of Newark's tweets to the President's online town halls, technology has already changed how the public engages with their government. In a world of ubiquitous broadband, this interaction can radically change how government operates and develops policy. This panel will explore how broadband can transform government/citizen engagement."
10 Search Engines to Explore the Deep End of the Invisible Web – I'm not sure how useful this actually is, but it's kinda interesting.
Local by Social – "This document outlines how local authorities can use social media to achieve more for less. It also highlights the risk to councils if they ignore the technological advances of social media and the people using them."
Socialtext: The 5 Most Critical Requirements for Enterprise Social Software – "How do you choose the Enterprise Social Software solution that will produce the greatest benefits for your company? In this white paper, we will show you the five most critical requirements for success."
Carnegie UK Trust – Democracy & Civil Society – Making good society – "Making good society, the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, argues that civil society has been pushed to the margins in key areas including politics, finance and the media and that this must change."
Case studies of corporate (social) learning – Great list of examples

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

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.

Bookmarks for March 8th through March 13th

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

Roundup: Social Media Monitoring Tools – WebWorkerDaily – Useful list of dashboard-like monitoring tools.
It is not about our App, It is about the User’s Data and Context | Zoho Blogs – “…whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context”
Google Apps Marketplace – “The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps.”
Google Reader – Play – “elcome to Google Reader Play, a fun, fast way to browse the most interesting stuff on the web, personalized just for you. We’ll keep track of the things you star, like, or share, and we’ll show you more stuff you’ll like the next time you use Reader Play.”
Plan for Welsh councils to work together collapses – “Local government reorganisation which cuts the number of councils is the only realistic option.”
Crown Copyright switches to Creative Commons – Information World Review – “Click-Use, the licence that for the last decade has authorised anyone to reuse government and Parliamentary information, is to be phased out by May.”
Google – public data – “The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.”
Steve Bridger › Putting your people at the heart of your social media strategy – “This was the title of a talk I gave at the end of February and I think it is important, and frankly, worth repeating over and over.”
Social Media Resources – The Altimeter – Useful wiki, full of lots of social media goodness.
publicSIRO – Public Sector Information Security News – New blog from Ian Cuddy cataloging public sector data losses.

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.

Mash the State

Mash the State is a campaign to “encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.”

The first part of the campaign is dedicated to getting local authorities in the UK using RSS to disseminate information from their websites. Currently only 66 of 434 local councils currently produce RSS.

Helpfully, a PDF one pager has been published to explain why this is a good idea. There is also a blog so you can keep up with developments.

Mash the State is the brainchild of Adrian Short, who has also founded a civic hacking club in Sutton, London; and developed a rather neat local news aggregator.

Show them a better way

Bit late on this one, but hey ho. The Power of Information Taskforce has launched a new initiative, which many commentators have ikened to the BBC Backstage project, to open up the way that government data can be hacked about. Effectively, ideas are being requested to improve the way government communicates. To quote the site, called Show Us a Better Way:

The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful. To provide you with some raw materials we will be posting some links to information sources here.

Steve Dale recorded a video of Tom Watson – the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for the Task Force – introducing the competition at 2gether08.

Bill Thompson writes:

The downside is that although they’ve got access to many of these sources they can’t be used freely yet, as there are still many restrictions on how we can exploit the data the government collects on our behalf. But if enough good ideas emerge then it will help put pressure on the various data holders to offer more permissive license, and we may eventually see a general presumption that public data is freely available to the public, as The Guardian has been arguing for a while now.

Simon Dickson says:

Having worked with several of the data suppliers listed, I’m delighted they managed to get agreement to expose their data – although I guess the backing of a Minister who actually understands it all can’t have done any harm. It’s especially inspiring to see the Office for National Statistics joining the effort, with the release of an API for its disappointing Neighbourhood Statistics. Here’s hoping the Community can do a better job on interface design and results presentation.

A term that has been bandied about a good deal recently in connected with this and other initiatives is ‘codesign’, the idea that processes and products are best developed in the open, with the cooperation and collaborative between government, organisations, communities and individuals.

In many ways, there is no reason why government shouldn’t engage in these sorts of developments, after all it theoretically shouldn’t have the competitive elements that might dissuade commercial enterprises from sharing all.

I wonder if I can tie in here the comment Tom Steinberg of MySociety left here recently, picking up on a point I made about who’s responsibility it is to actually get things done in this space:

“Is it organisations like MySociety? Or is it every individual with a laptop and a broadband connection? I am beginning to suspect the answer is the latter”

That would be awesome, but until Ning gets good enough to make building sites like WhatDoTheyKnow into a point-and-click exercise we’ll have to keep filling the gaps, sorry!

Of course, there is no need for Tom to apologise at all. There is a gap at the moment, and MySociety is filling it, and enriching the online political experience better than anyone else. No doubt too that MySociety will be coming up with some awesome, innovative ideas to make use of data, whether through Show Us a Better Way or not.

Exercises like this one just launched by the Taskforce make the liklihood of a growing army of bedroom government institutional hackers all the more likely. They may only have a very narrow interest in a specific part of government. They may not want to help government at all, but maybe groups on the outside of the usual political processes. Either way, they may nevr have had the chance to participate in these kind of exercises before.

It will be interesting to see, if the codesign concept takes off within government, whose (who’s?) responsibility it ends up being. It’s not a webby’s job, really, but it isn’t strictly a policy thing either. It blends and mashes the two into a new role as ill-defined and messy as the process of codesign itself. How this can fit into a departmental org chart, God only knows.

Tag: data

Bookmarks for March 18th through March 20th

Young Rewired State

Mash the State

Show them a better way