links

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

• WordPress Mobile Pack « WordPress Plugins – "The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog."
•   A digital engagement framework adapted for local government by Michele Ide-Smith – "I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement."
• Trackle.com – Find It. Track It. Share It. – Trackle looks a really good option as an online monitoring tool.
• TeaCamp – A blog to help folk keep track of the regular government tea drinking meetups.
• Why do councils still use Internet Explorer 6? | Learning Pool Blog – "the web has moved on substantially since then and, given that Microsoft has released two excellent versions of the browser since, I think its time for local government to turn its back on an outdated, insecure and slow browser."
• Local knowledge is everything – BankerVision – "We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers. Well, we’re not."
• Cloud Culture: any new threats? « Perfect Path – "My personal experience with Tuttle has been that the network is much stronger and more robust than we imagine. Whenever it get’s a push against it, it either repels invaders or morphs into something similar enough to still be Tuttle, but different enough to survive."
• Innovation unlimited – Enterprise and Industry – European Commission – Interesting use of a blog from the EU's innovation unit.
• So your council wants to blog? – "Having said that blogs are mundane, there are still not many examples of blogs written by local government officers (as opposed to councillors or community activists)."
• Communicating Cohesion: Evaluating Local Authority Communication Strategies – "The report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation into local authority communications, from the perspective of promoting community cohesion. The findings reinforce the need for effective communications to address perceptions by some groups that they are losing out to others and the need for local authorities to take a strategic approach to communications that needs to involve not just the council staff and elected members, but the community itself."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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

• A Policy Dialogue Platform | Promoting Better Governance – "As part of the CIO Series 2009-10, Dave Mansfield answered questions on role of ICT in local government- the benefits, the challenges as well as what the future holds."
• Repping the UK Scene | Huddle Up – Huddle.net’s Official Collaboration Blog – Interesting! "Our entry was an over-ambitious and unwieldy affair: we wanted to synchronise content between different instances of Sharepoint, each behind their own corporate firewall, using the collaboration features of Huddle to provide the heavy lifting and identity federation."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Newspapers v councils « Tom Calver’s musings – "And behind the whole local paper argument though there seems to be a staggering arrogance. These owners and their journalists apparently believe that their papers have a right to exist that is independent of their readers. Even if nobody reads it, the very existence of the paper is a Good Thing."
• eLearn: Best Practices – Tips for Effective Webinars – "Giving an effective webinar requires some presentation redesign and technology skills that you don't necessarily need in a face-to-face presentation. A great speaker in a face-to-face environment can easily crash and burn in a webinar setting if he or she isn't prepared for the unique challenges and needs of that environment."
• SOCIAL MEDIA: Your EIGHT step guide to getting started… « The Dan Slee Blog – Dan Slee is a credit to Walsall Council. "Here’s some thoughts on how to go about turning your organisation into something fit for the 21st century."
• Google Reader (1000+) – The event is about bringing local innovators together for a day to develop prototypes of online tools that tackle challenges about accessing local public sector services online – basically looking to make local residents’ lives easier through better online tools. And the things the event creates should be easily reused in other local areas throughout the UK.
• Jailbrake – "Jailbrake is a competition to find and support great ideas that could break the cycle of youth offending using simple web and mobile tools."
• Rocketbox – Powerful e-mail search for Apple Mail – "Rocketbox is a powerful, new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app. It's never been faster or easier to find what you need."
• HipChat – Private chat for your company or team – "HipChat brings better-than-enterprise instant messaging to your organization. Get more done with chat rooms, file sharing, and searchable chat history. It’s a more productive and fun way to work."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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

• UKGovCamp as the future | The Democratic Society – "I suspect – I hope – we will look back on days like Saturday as a time of shared preparation for something much bigger: an agreeable Enlightenment salon heralding the harder, more disappointing work of social transformation. "
• Barnet Council FixMyStreet – Barnet Council team up with FixMyStreet – cool.
• Online basics – Online basics is a free, easy to use course that will help you get started using computers and the internet.
• CPSRenewal.ca: Column: When Social Location Sharing Meets Government Services – "Where location sharing services like Foursquare and governments collide will most likely be in the area of service delivery. More specifically, Foursquare (or whatever location sharing service rivals it) will be a key social space for any government agency that delivers service via a service center."
• Lotus Puts the Labs to Work: On Innovation – Interesting stuff coming out of IBM, beautifully written up by @monkchips
• WordPress Foundation – "The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software."
• Stretching Resources 3: Using new technology | Opinion | Local Government Chronicle – "It is the right time to be thinking creatively and using modern, user-centered technology to make it possible for public sector workers to meet the demands of their jobs in as streamlined a way as possible."
• Lotus Knows, But Do You Know Lotus? – "Lotus is able to deliver what Google Wave fails to address: providing a solution that improves personal productivity without forcing a change in work behavior."
• The benefits of blogging – Great post by Julia Chandler on DfID's blogging experience
• Can We Categorize Participation and Collaboration? – "I thought it would be useful to distinguish two types of participation and two types of collaboration"

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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

• The Governance Ladder « Carl’s Notepad – "The key thing for me in thinking this way is that i don’t believe that Governance should be seen as something which is rigid and fixed in an organisation. I believe that we need to start adapting our Governance to the circumstances and providing a greater level of education, awareness and information so that people (not the processes) can make better decisions in the first place."
• REWORK: The new business book from 37signals. – The new business book from 37signals.
• Defra, UK – UK Location – Nice new WordPress microsite for Defra by Simon Dickson
• co-operative News – Co-ops can help transform public services – report – "The Innovation Unit, a London-based independent social enterprise dedicated to supporting the third sector, has published an independent ‘think piece’ — The Engagement Ethic — outlining the potential for co-operatives and mutuals to help transform public services. "
• Gov 2.0: Gov 2.0 Hero: Dominic Campbell – Much like in the US, the majority of digital engagement in the UK has been about a race to develop shiny new websites and get government agencies on Twitter and the whole spectrum of social tools. The focus has predominantly been on better PR and communications which has indeed led to some improvements, but even then nowhere near as rapidly as you might hope.
• NESTA Connect: The internal challenge of open innovation – "The open innovation professionals whom i've worked with who are most successful work just as hard, if not even harder, to network within their organisations to find the right people to be able to make a deal happen once they've sourced one externally. And tools like twitter are, in part, so exciting to me because they form a wonderful shortcut into organisations bypassing existing channels or opening up entirely new channels of communication that didn't exist previously. "
• Showing a better way – honestlyreal – "And as far as I’m aware, the fundamental problem with innovation in public services is this confusion between what constitutes ideas, and what constitutes service implementation."
• Backupify :: Secure Online Backup and Archiving for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress – "Your online accounts contain important information. Don’t risk losing any of it. Sign up for our online account backup and you will never have to worry about losing a thing."
• How to crowd source an IT strategy – BankerVision – "Big organisations are challenged when you ask them for quick decisions."
• How To Build An Online Community: The Ultimate List Of Resources – FeverBee – "This is a collection of my favourite and most popular posts from the last two years. It should give you a great overview about both the strategy any the process of creating an online community from scratch." Fabulous.
• Cisco’s Top 10 Predictions for 2010 – "Some leadership teams will view 2010 as an opportunity to pull ahead of their competition by investing in a collaboration architecture that will further improve their team’s productivity"

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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

• Departmental Dialogue Index – "This research project has identified and developed a diagnostic tool, the Departmental Dialogue Index (DDI), that will allow Departments to better understand their propensity to engage with the public."
• Zengobi – Curio 6 – Interesting Mac mind mapping software
• Is listening neutral? | Podnosh – "The core piece of advice for any public service on how to make good use of social media is “learn to listen”. It’s the one part of the conversation that sometimes gets lost in the rush to publish."
• CPSRenewal.ca: Column: Risky Business: Deputy Minister or Bust – "I cannot even recall the number of times I have been told that what I am doing on this blog, via twitter and other social media is incredibly "risky". I get the impression that many people assume that my risk tolerance is higher than the average public servant, and perhaps they are right. However if I am indeed more tolerant of risk, I would argue that it is because the way in which I frame risk is markedly different than how it is typically framed in the bureaucracy. "
• Government 2.0: Communication and Engagement Are On a Collision Course – "In essence, in gov 2.0 terms an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy. The former chooses and controls channels, while the latter joins somebody else’s channels The former determines rules of engagement, the latter follows somebody else’s rules. The former assumes that citizens reach out to government, the latter is based on government reaching out to communities and groups."
• How low is the common denominator? | Public Strategist – "Do brilliant ideas have to have polarised responses, or can they be brilliant and inclusive?"
• The Power of Technology to Transform Government – Steve Ballmer on Open Government: "I’m encouraged by this forum. It’s another strong signal that leaders at the very highest level of the federal government recognize that information technology has the potential to transform government by making it more efficient, more effective and more responsive."
• We Can Work It Out – NLGN – We argue that democratically elected councils must sit at the heart of a complex ecosystem of services and must develop their role in order to ensure greater co-ordination of support for people at the frontline. Skills quangos at the regional spatial tier should be streamlined to cut out the complexity of the current system, and local authorities must take the lead in commissioning welfare-to-work programmes from the corridors of Whitehall.
• Space Of Waste – Yay for govbloggers! "Hello world! My name is Lucy Toman, and I recently started working in Municipal Waste Management in Defra."
• WordPress official user interface mailing list – Just that: WordPress now has a dedicated mailing list to discuss issues around the user experience
• Understanding participation: A literature review — Pathways Through Participation – The review brings together different bodies of literature on participation, including literature on community development, volunteering, public participation, social movements, everyday politics and ethical consumption.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.