govweb – Dave Briggs

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Enyo JavaScript Application Framework – "Use the same framework to develop apps for the web and for all major platforms, desktop and mobile."
Features | Re-usable Drupal recipes for government websites – Nice New Zealand government site sharing open source compontents for Drupal for gov webbies
Consultation Principles – guidance | Cabinet Office – "…the Government is improving the way it consults by adopting a more proportionate and targeted approach, so that the type and scale of engagement is proportional to the potential impacts of the proposal."
Inviting comments on a draft bill | Stephen Hale – "With a public commitment to feed the comments that we receive directly into the process of parliamentary scrutiny via the team working on the bill, we’re effectively enabling people to publicly contribute to the drafting of law."
The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search – A rare thing indeed – an interesting and genuinely useful post about search engine optimisation! Who would have thought that such a thing was even possible!?!?!

What I’ve been reading

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

BDU: Big Data – E-learning about "big data" which people keep telling me is going to be important.
WP2Cloud – Interesting one for WordPress dorks (like me). Stores all your WP site stuff in Amazon's cloud.
Announcing Open Space South West #OpenSSW – Sounds like it will be a fun event – well done Carl Haggerty!
Sir Bob Kerslake: why social media is a vital tool for the civil service – …and not just the civil service of course. Nice to see positive noises from the top
Antibodies, Attack Dogs, and Success Cats: 3 New Product Lessons – Even innovating in innovation organisations isn't easy.
Acting on the annual user survey | Stephen Hale – Great open discussion about website user happiness.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for April 28th through May 18th

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

Local Government Graduate Gripes – "How would a networked, open, innovative, tech-enabled, social recruitment scheme for government work?"
10 things Alpha.gov.uk gets wrong (Part 1) | Helpful Technology – Nicely contrarian points from Steph on the new government website prototype.
Would you like sauce with your policy? – Steph's writeup on recent stuff coming out of the government on consultation and open policy making.
Is this really the death of political blogging? – Interesting overview of the political blogging scene.
Supporting an Epic Swindle « Digital Social Innovation – Nice post from Manny about Liverpool football supporters using the web to organise their campaigns.
The ongoing need for openness in government – A quick bit more explaining from me about what the hell Kind of Digital does.
Three great posts about micro-participation – Links to some great writing on micro-participation.
How can Kind of Digital help you? – A blatant bit of advertising.
LINKED SOCIAL: Eight steps of social media evolution in local government « The Dan Slee Blog – Nice overview from Dan.
There is no such thing as IT | Public Strategist – Great notes on government IT and agile.
Agile for communications « Sharon O’Dea – Brilliant, comprehensive overview from Sharon.

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.

New Zealand Gov blog

The New Zealand State Services Commission has started a blog – you can find it here. In their words:

We’re aiming to build thought leadership around significant work programmes, including Authentication, Strategy and Policy and Web Standards, as well as providing a best practice example of how to effectively manage social media as part of public sector communications. Other agencies ask us for guidance in setting up their own blogs – what better way to help them than to give a clear demonstration of how we do it, and the policies behind our thinking? We’d like to look at how the public and the Government can interact better through the use of new technologies. We’re interested in issues around identity, privacy, accessibility, intellectual property, e-government guidelines and Web 2.0. If you have thoughts or feelings in this area, you’re our target audience, whether you work for the government or not.

They have some interesting posts up already, including one on gov ICT strategy in the current unsettled financial situation:

Long term fiscal pressures need long term investment and expenditure responses. In New Zealand government ICT we have a unique window of opportunity in the next 2-5 years arising from the replacement of “legacy” transaction processing systems implemented in the 1990s. We can redesign systems and re-engineer business processes across agencies to meet the expectations of the information age.

And this on government officials and Wikipedia:

Superficially, Te Ara, an encyclopaedia run by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, seems to be a competitor of Wikipedia: they offer the same service. However, unlike consumers of shoes or cars, consumers of information need not (and seldom do) choose one or the other: their produce is complementary and their relationship is mutually beneficial. Wikipedia relies on sites like Te Ara as references for their content, and Te Ara relies on sites like Wikipedia linking to Te Ara as a resource, in turn directing traffic there.

Good stuff and well worth subscribing. Wouldn’t it be good to have an agenda setting ‘official’ blog for government at all levels in the UK?

Found via the Connected Republic.

I have been playing with FriendFeed today. It’s an interesting service that I first wrote about back in February, but haven’t paid a massive amount of attention to since. For those not in the know, FriendFeed is a service that performs three main functions:

It allows you to aggregate the content you put online using different services into one place, such as your blog posts, flickr photos, YouTube videos, delicious bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, etc etc
It allows you to subscribe to your contacts’ friendfeeds too, and presents all of their items, along with yours into a single timeline, so you can follow what people are up to
It allows you to comment on items in people’s feeds, as well as marking whether you like them or not. So it becomes another place where conversations might happen, though with Twitter Friendfeed will add your comments to that service too.

This last point is one which would bother me a little, I guess, because I would prefer it that comments about what I do (mainly on this blog) all appear in one place. Perhaps I am already being overtaken by how distributed conversations can now become, who knows. But at the moment, other than a few very high profile folk, not that many people appear to be spending a lot of time in FriendFeed.

I’m starting to see some of the value, especially now I have reduced the number of people I follow. This is not like twitter, with short messages, people can have loads of different things reported into their FriendFeed and the noise can be deafening. Better to keep FriendFeed as the place you track your most preferred sources of stuff, I reckon. If you would like to follow me, I am at http://friendfeed.com/davebriggs.

One other bit of functionality of FriendFeed, though, is rooms. These are separate pages on the site which allow groups of people to recommend content to each other, whether in the form of short messages or posted links, photos, videos, blog posts etc etc. It seems like a cool, easy way of sharing and discussing online resources. I have started a room for government webby stuff at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/govweb – do join in and let’s see how useful it actually is!