innovation – Page 9 – Dave Briggs

Do we need skunkworks in local government?

January 4, 2011

Simon Dickson has been doing his best to keep us up to date with the government skunkworks, the project to form a tight group of innovators in central government to work on new ideas.

If you’re new to the idea of a skunkworks, here’s the Wikipedia page. Basically, a skunkworks

is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organisation given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Steph also recently posted a couple of interviews with two public sector skunkworks style outfits, which is well worth a read.

This got me thinking: does local government need something similar? If it does, should it be a central body, or perhaps something that individual councils should have? Maybe it could be a shared service between groups of councils.

I’d be really interested in what people think.

I do wonder where innovation fits in to local government this year. After all, theoretically, it ought to be a time when organisations try new things and new ways of working to improve efficiency and reduce costs. However as Ingrid alluded to in her recent post, retrenchment might be more likely.

A quick reminder about the brilliant Little Innovation Book by James Gardner that you can read for free online and is a great primer on innovation matters.

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

December 10, 2010

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

Living with rats: Nine signposts towards Our Society – Good stuff from @juliandobson
Wikileaks and the Long Haul – Shirky on Wikileaks
What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us – John Naughton nails it on the Wikileaks saga.
Budget consultation approaches by Michele Ide-Smith – Nice summary of some of the recent work from Michele.
I’m not anti-SharePoint – chieftech’s blog – Yup – Sharepoint's problems are usually in its implementation, not in the software itself.
Government data in the public domain – intrinsically good, right? – Great stuff from @rossferg
Connected Kingdom – "The UK has a thriving internet economy. It has the potential to grow even bigger. We want your ideas for ways to make that growth happen."
Learning about content strategy by Michele Ide-Smith – Great stuff on organising your website contributors and getting processes and systems right from Michele.
Innovation functions in large organisations – Great insights from @katebennet on innovating.
eDiplomacy: The US State Department’s Global Collaborative Backbone – Interesting stuff on collaborative tech in US.gov

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.

Apples and ideas

November 2, 2010

George Bernard Shaw on collaboration. Yes, really:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Bookmarks for October 3rd through October 19th

October 30, 2010

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

Solace 2010 write up; Localism, hash tags and a reflection on priorities – Great write up from Catherine Howe.
Thriving too: Big Society: Yours Mine and Ours – "So how do smaller networks, organisations and projects engage with Big Society if they don’t feel completely comfortable in the space?"
How #gmp24 happened – "The challenge was to find a way to show people the wide range of issues the police are called to deal with."
The Problem with WordPress at Helpful Technology: Blog – Great summary of what sounds like a great event.
When social media reveal IT’s soft belly – "When I was in Canada last week, I visited two provincial government organizations that offered two intriguing examples of how social media are challenging their IT organizations."
Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? – Whose in charge of getting people to talk to each other in your organisation?
Jimmy Leach: Keep the blogs alight – "We may not solve foreign policy issues through blogs, but we can at least explain them better."
Open source based Managed Learning platform saves public purse £36 million – Learning Pool saves government cash. Find out how.
Too much money plays against government 2.0 – "Definitely an interesting perspective: transparency is not always a desirable attribute, and government 2.0 is more interesting – and useful – where the are scarce rather than abundant resources."
Local By Social – Series of events around the country by LGID promoting online innovation in local gov.
PDF Europe round up – Great summary of the recent PDF Europe event from @curiousc
Catch.com – Interesting looking Evernote alternative.
Training lessons learned: Code dojo, whiteboards, interactivity – "Training can be an incredibly boring, frustrating exercise."
The four sorts of Innovation-Getter | Kate Bennet – "After working in an Innovation team for the last year it’s become apparent that there are four sorts of “innovation-getters” in organisations."
The Stack: The Fifteen Classes of the Social Business Software Suite – Interesting attempt at classification of social tech

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.

The death of crowd control

October 5, 2010

James Gardner:

The point, of course, is that if the central thinking is that communications are about crowd control, then organisations are really forcing the many-to-many communication outside their organisation. Although I don’t think we are about crowd control at the department, the fact that we don’t have our new communications channels yet has already resulted in crowds forming beyond the firewall. Imagine the circumstance when new channels, far being lacking, aren’t even allowed.

My conclusion, based on this, is that crowd control is pretty much dead. And that centralised command-and-control will soon follow.

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