fco – Dave Briggs

What I’ve been reading

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

Getting the digital debate going – Jimmy Leach announces the FCO's conference on cyberspace. Sounds interesting!
Mid year review: the state of DH digital – Great honest review of activity in digital at the Dept Health
Ofsted Parent View – Interesting "Parent's Opinion" style school feedback site from Ofsted.
Staff, social media policies and managing risk – Good stuff from Simon Wakeman on the need for organisations to have a clear approach to social media and networking.
Trimming the long tail – the danger of stripping back our websites – Interesting addition to the debate around the top task focus on local government websites.
Introduction to Databases – Stanford University – Free online course. Interesting!
Thinktanks are in crisis. To survive, they must become ‘do tanks’ – "For thinktanks to be effective, they must be imaginative and radical. But a funding crisis is making them increasing bland."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for July 28th through August 5th

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

NHS spends millions on websites that fail patients, says government report | Society | The Guardian – "The NHS spends up to £86m a year on thousands of websites that are difficult to find, badly designed and irrelevant to patient needs, according to a leaked government report."
Open data on the cheap at Helpful Technology – "…without the cost and complexity of building and mantaining a full API to their database, a corporate public sector organisation has been able to support reuse in a quick and simple way."
Retooled — Retooled is a place to find and share experiences of the rollercoaster of redundancy. – "This site was begun by a group of employees who were all made redundant when our company MG Rover closed. We hope by sharing our experiences, Retooled will be valuable to anyone who is going through redundancy."
Straight Statistics – "We are a campaign established by journalists and statisticians to improve the understanding and use of statistics by government, politicians, companies, advertisers and the mass media."
Data.gov.uk chief admits transparency concerns – "Cabinet Office official Richard Stirling, who leads the team that runs Data.gov.uk, said that if he was at the Office for National Statistics he would have concerns about statistical releases and people making assumptions "that aren't quite valid"."
i-volunteer.org.uk – "i-volunteer is a social network that connects volunteers, charities and volunteer managers across the UK."
Does Outsourcing Destroy IT Innovation? – "…those that outsource IT on a wholesale basis "struggle to use IT to drive value and have limited strategic flexibility as the business context evolves and hardware prices plummet.""
The community right to build – do we know if it will work? – "We think that when these reforms come out in the wash at the local level, it will often be the role, and the responsibility, of local (parish and town) councils and their committed volunteer councillors to make planning work positively for local places."
All systems (about to) go – "[the knowledge hub] will be a place to discover a wide range of materials and content to support the development and improvement of local public services."
Council stages CovJam to help shape Coventry’s future – "In what has the potential to become a blueprint for cities around the globe, the council staged the world's first city-wide online conversation with nearly 900 local residents, businesses and public bodies."

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 June 7th through June 17th

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

What Does Government Transformation Mean, Exactly? – "Rather than fantasizing about the myth of transformation, governments have to accept that future is no longer predictable and focus on what changes are necessary to make them more flexible and nimble to adapt to uncertainty."
open data doesn’t empower communities | internet.artizans – "Open data doesn't empower communities. I'm not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact."
The battle for data, the battle for design | Public Strategist – "The availability of data is a critical enabler, but what matters in the end is what it enables."
Re-use of open data and applying the same idea within WCC – "…the beginning of a universal API for the organisation." Wowza.
Better Junk Mail – Quick Analysis from the Enterprise 2.0 World – "The positive side is more along the lines of companies realizing the smarts they have in their employees heads and the horizontal connections – and then, of course, re-orienting work to take advantage of them and (we’d hope) figure out compensating employees beyond the org. tree."
Government 2.0: If Engaging is Difficult, Keeping Engaged is More So – "What keeps me going is the use of my blog as my personal knowledge base. Many times, when I prepare a client inquiry, a presentation or a research note, I can go back to the blog and find an example, a nugget, a pesky comment that help me do the job I am measured and paid for."
Empire Disruption – BankerVision – "My experience is that big organsiations create situations where the politics of success dictate you grow your control of people and resources, even when that is counterproductive to the task you're actually supposed to be achieving. "
Lists made easy + social + fun! – twtPickin – Nice tool for collaborating on lists with twitter buddies
Diplodocus – A community for international digital government people – "…a community of people doing international facing digital work for governments"
iAnnotate for iPad – "iAnnotate is both an elegant PDF reader and a powerful annotation tool that finally lets you work with your PDFs. You can open documents from email, sign and send out contracts fast, enter notes for edits, sketch diagrams, copy text, and add highlights or underline with the drag of a finger!"

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.

Stephen Hale now blogging at FCO

Simon Dickson reports that Stephen Hale, the FCO’s “Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy” is now blogging:

Makes sense for numerous reasons of course, not least as a means of setting a good example for colleagues. I mean, would you trust a ‘blogging expert’ who didn’t blog?

Stephen’s first few posts are all pretty interesting, and he’ll make a great addition to the Public Sector Blogs line up. I’ve now added him to the list.

Interesting stuff going on at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with a wiki being built by Ben Hammersley using MediaWiki with a bit of skinning and the addition of a few plugins, like that which adds social network type features to the wiki.

It’s a nice piece of work, though I have personal reservations about MediaWiki as a collaboration platform, rather than just community-publishing content. But then it’s free as in beer and speech, and very quick to deploy.

Let’s hope that this wiki experiment isn’t vandalised to death like the last one that a department headed by David Miliband experienced.

In other wiki news, I have been taking a look at the white-label services offered by wiki-hosts Wikispaces today. For £500 a year, you can have as many wikis as you like running off subdomains of a web address of your choice. Each can have it’s own access criteria, and with the rich and easy to use functionality of Wikispaces, it’s an absolute bargain.

Tag: fco

What I’ve been reading

Bookmarks for July 28th through August 5th

Bookmarks for June 7th through June 17th

Stephen Hale now blogging at FCO

Getting wiki with it