government – Page 16

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.

Bookmarks for April 19th through April 23rd

April 23, 2010

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

Open innovation, why bother? – 100% Open – "…if open innovation is to deliver sustainable business advantage then we need a better understanding of what motivates contributors to these initiatives, else there is a risk of a backlash against them…"
Docs.com – MS Office + Facebook beats Google Docs? Am not convinced!
TALKI – The easiest way to embed a forum – Embed a forum on your website – just like that! Users can sign in with Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts.
Government 2.0 Can and Must Save Money – "I think that the current shortage of resources and a sometimes dramatic budgetary situation can be a powerful incentive to make this change happen, to tap into the creativity of employees as well as external resources." YES!!!
Red Sweater Blog – Apple Downloads – VERY interesting – is Apple going to go down the App Store route for vetting Mac software now, too?
HTML5 presentation – "Slideshow-style presentation on HTML5 made using HTML5."
CDC Provides a Great Example of What Social Media Is About – "CDC’s strategy puts them in a better position to identify patterns where trust may be shifting elsewhere early enough to take action: many other agencies worldwide, which just care about publishing data and creating their Facebook pages, will be taken by surprise."
data.lincoln.gov.uk (beta) – Lincoln City Council start publishing data publicly – great work, and props to Andrew Beeken who must have driven this through.
Simplifying the social web with XAuth – "We think that XAuth can simplify and improve the social web, while keeping your private information safe. This is just one of many steps that Google is taking, along with others in the industry, to make the social web easier and more personalized."
Open Government and the Future of Public Sector IT – Great talk from Microsoft's Dave Coplin.

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 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.

Bookmarks for April 5th through April 10th

April 11, 2010

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

Social Media Security – "We have found a huge lack of accurate information around security issues and awareness of social media. This website aims to help educate users of social media of the threats, risks and privacy concerns that go with using them."
E-government is not a financial cure-all – "Whoever is in charge after 6 May, I expect the drive towards "smarter government" (or whatever catch phrase replaces it) to continue. There are simply no other tools in the box. But whoever is in charge will avidly wish someone had made a bolder start while the going was good."
bantApp.com: Bant Diabetes Monitoring App for the iPhone and iPod Touch – Interesting iphone app for diabetes management, via @robertbrook
Two models of open innovation – "Based on our recent experience of working on open innovation projects, and also building upon a great paper by Kevin Boudreau and Karim Lakhani, we have concluded that there are two distinct ways of doing open innovation – creating competitive markets or collaborative communities"
Let government screw up – "I have the opportunity to speak to groups across government about the benefits, challenges and potential costs of social media. In the face of institutional anxiety, I’ve argued that social media is a positive environment that encourages experimentation. In fact, online users are willing to accept mis-steps and stumbles from government organizati0ns simply because it demonstrates initiative and ambition, if not expertise."
Project Spaces: A Format for Surfacing New Projects – home – "The event format I'm calling Project Spaces has emerged from working with various collaborators to facilitate events for communities actively engaged and committed to finding better ways to do things."
Can Open Office Escape From Under A Cloud? – "I do see a future for Open Office in the enterprise — one that’s closely tied to integration with collaboration, content management, and business processes and facilitated by the likes of Oracle and IBM."
A democratic view of social media behaviours – Interesting action research post from Catherine – plenty to chew on here.
Digital exclusion, porn and games – "I wonder if – as with mobile phones – there’s a certain, influential generation that see the technology as being more than just a technology. And instead, a marker for a whole way of life they just haven’t accepted yet."
Social media measurement – Great stuff from Stuart Bruce – debunking a few myths and some marketing BS.

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.

Using the places database

April 9, 2010

I was asked recently by a colleague for some information about the names and locations of local authorities in this country. I was able to respond quickly and usefully thanks to the places database, which sits on the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Here’s what I did, as a simple example of what you can do with this resource. We’re just going to produce a spreadsheet containing the names and contact information for local councils in England. I’m no expert on this stuff, but hopefully this demonstrates some of what is possible, and encourages folk to have a play.

First, go to http://www.places.communities.gov.uk/ in your web browser.

Scroll down and choose ‘download data by theme’:

Download data

On the next screen, we need to tell the system what information we want to extract through a number of steps. Here’s what steps 1-3 should look like for our example (click for a bigger version):

For step 1 select Current, step 2 select Key Facts, step 3 select Local Authority.

Two more questions to answer:

Step 4 choose Place Details, Step 5 leave start and end dates both as current.

Finally, there is a bit of a warning message – which I just ignore – and then the option to download the data as either an Excel spreadsheet or in CSV format:

Then just hit download, and your data will be saved to your computer. Dead easy.

Thanks to Martin Stone who first pointed this out to me.

I’d be interested to find out what uses other people have been putting this tool to.

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