directgov – Dave Briggs

What I’ve been reading

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

Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting – "Large collaborative projects aren't, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort."
Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting – "Large collaborative projects aren't, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort."
Will it be orange? | Government Digital Service – Is orange a good colour for a government website?
Does democracy have to be political? | The Democratic Society – "I can’t be the only one who has been struck by the way in which the people getting involved with the community clear-ups after the riots have been so keen to state that their motive is not political."
Opening government, the Chicago way – O’Reilly Radar – "To get anywhere close to achieving that goal, Chicago will have to close the IT gap between the public and private sector, particularly in the emerging field of data science."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What I’ve been reading

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

2011 London Social Business Summit – Great content from this event.
Introducing South West LocalGovCamp #swlocalgc « Carl’s Notepad – This should be a good one!
’100 million comments a year’ – mutual support and advice in a shrinking state – How government could be making better use of online communities – great stuff from Will Perrin.
Misleading money-saving claims help no one – Ben Goldacre exposes the lazy thinking involved in some "research" about council spending – curiously promoted by CLG.
BBC News – Google’s Chromebook – lost in the cloud? – Interesting review of the new Chrome based laptops.
A little local difficulty – honestlyreal – A very useful primer on Local DirectGov
How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs – Really nice workflow system.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for February 23rd through April 4th

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

Reaping the benefits of shared services – Interesting interview with @terryhuggins on the shared services arrangement between South Holland and East Lindsay councils.
UK IT Strategy Sets the Pace for All European Governments, But Can They Deliver? – Interesting coverage of the new UK gov IT strategy
NESTA – Innovation in Public Sector Organisations – "A pilot survey for measuring innovation across the public sector" – interesting read
Loosemore leads Lane Fox vision work | Puffbox.com – Nice update from Simon on some interesting developments.
Things about Blogging – Great blogging tips
COI is dead, long live the GCC? – Good coverage of the future of COI from Andrew.
Seldom a love story: IT and end users – O’Reilly Radar – "Prioritization must be determined by the business, not an IT staffer who's just trying to do the right thing."
Fear of Facebook: Thoughts On The Meaning of Social – "Things aren’t getting any better in terms of privacy related fears."
The zero cost CMS | Stephen Hale – "The digital communications teams I’ve worked in have all spent too much of their time finding ways around the CMS, and not enough time actually communicating."
Citizen journalist or citizen? – Good stuff on bloggers reporting on councils by @podnosh

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 September 10th through September 14th

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

MindQuilt – "MindQuilt is an enterprise knowledge management platform with intelligent question and answer matchmaking and gaming achievement dynamics."
Tiny Tiny RSS – Host your own Google Reader clone.
Challenge.gov : The central platform for all US Government challenges, contests and innovation prizes. – "Challenge.gov is a place where the public and government can solve problems together."
The future of digital public services – "The key to this is that Directgov should continue to move to be the facilitators not owners or delivers of the content and apps, they should establish the proper governance, standards and quality assurance for app providers, setting minimum standards that ensure quality and interoperability."
WordPress › Email Post Changes plugin – Potentially spectacularly helpful WordPress plugin.
Beyond Access – a "Public Consultation on access to information and open government data"
Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash – "Moving forward, there are a lot more lessons we can learn if we build our social tools with the assumption that no one version of any document, app, or narrative needs to be the definitive one. We might even make our software, and our communities, more inclusive if we embrace the forking ourselves."
Resources for exploring social media participation – Brill stuff from @timdavies on online youth participation.
The Social Network: Facebook’s intriguing world revealed – "How did Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, from a comfortably middle-class background, become one of the most powerful men in the world?"
Hand Made from Social Spaces – "Hand Made is a beautiful collaborative book with 26 innovative perspectives and projects from around the world, over 230 pages, about new ways of creating connection and community. The projects have been carefully selected because they have all been developed with new thinking and methodologies and involve Learning, Sharing or Making."
A Brief Guide To Reaching Unbelievably High Levels Of Participation In Your Online Community – Some great tips in here.

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.

Snow business

The snow has made it a tricky week this week, with transport problems and the local school being closed. What’s more, just outside Cambridge, the snow is still falling on DavePress Towers.

It’s quite pretty, mind.

It’s hasn’t all been bad news, though. As Tom Watson reports, the confusion around the schools closures spurred DirectGov’s innovation dudes into swift action. Whilst the site is down right now for maintenence, this type of proof-of-concept prototyping is just what government needs to test what works and what doesn’t before project managers and the like get their claws into things.

Another remarkable outcome of the weather was the use of the #uksnow hashtag and snow level rating system which spread on twitter. Paul Clarke tells the story:

Fresh from yesterday’s UK Government Web BarCamp, #ukgc09 (worth looking at ukgovweb.org), my mind was pretty open to data sets and what could be done with them. Except the contents of #uksnow wasn’t data – at least nothing that could be readily useable.

Time for a suggestion on standards. I’d put my own tweet out about weather conditions in RH1, so quickly came up with a format: #uksnow [1st part of postcode] [n/10]; as a simple way of getting the holy trinity of mashable data together. Place, condition and time (from Twitter’s own logging). Bingo – three things that could readily be parsed by someone with the time and inclination to do so. And then analysed, mapped, mashed, shared, whatever…

What’s really interesting is the way that Twitter is starting to be used effectively as a command line. People seem to have no problem typing data in conforming to a form of markup so that their contributions can be parsed and mashed up.

FixMyStreet on DirectGov!

Tom Watson reports via Twitter that MySociety’s FixMyStreet is now embedded in DirectGov. On the page in question, a boxout gives you the option of reporting a problem via FixMyStreet rather than through the usual route of DirectGov linking you through to your local authority.

An interesting example of making volunteer effort a part of the ‘official’ government offering. I have had some interesting discussions with some local gov folk about how useful FixMyStreet actually is, so it will be fascinating to see how this is received.