localgovweb – Dave Briggs

Link roundup

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

What should a UK Open Government Partnership Forum look like? : Tim’s Blog – "Open spaces events across that whole UK that provide access for all ages are key to an effective UK OGP forum."
Five strategies for building better council websites | Adrian Short – More excellence from Adrian.
A Primer for Blogging – Nice list of tips for newbie bloggers.
Better questions get better answers | Public Strategist – "Getting the right answer is important. But it is impossible to get the right answer unless we ask the right question. Time and effort invested in better questions pays off in better answers."
PyBossa – PyBossa is a free, open-source, platform for creating and running crowd-sourcing applications that utilise online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more!

What I’ve been reading

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

Tales of the city: the rise of the local blog – "In its daily blogposts, Spitalfields Life aims to portray the full colour of life in London's East End. But who is the mysterious 'Gentle Author' behind this extraordinary work of social history?"
Apache Cordova – "Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript."
Building Community in your Area? There’s a Handbook for that! – "The Community Organizers Handbook is the one-stop-shop for tips, tricks and how-tos for organizing local communities."
User experience design on new.shropshire.gov.uk – Project WIP – "Our aim is to provide the user with best experience we can possibly give them allowing them to do what they want quickly and easily."
When is an ‘official’ Twitter account not an official Twitter account? | Puffbox.com – "Much consternation in certain political circles this afternoon, as Boris Johnson renames his Twitter account… and takes a quarter of a million people's details over to his election campaign HQ."
The problem with digital politics – "If the major parties get their act together, the next election could be a very interesting time indeed for technology-watchers."
@LiamStacey9 : Tangential Ramblings – "Online hate is a big problem. Children, adults, celebrities and people outside of the public eye are all victims. The trouble is: those that dole out the abuse don’t seem to be the sorts of people who care."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

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 December 12th through December 30th

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

Five (grim) predictions for 2011 – Ingrid expresses a few concerns. Let's work to make sure this stuff doesn't happen!
What Localism might mean for local gov web managers by Michele Ide-Smith – Great stuff as always from Michele. A must read for folk interested in web and local gov.
Teach Parents Tech – Lovely: "This site was built by a few folks at Google to help keep tech support a family business."
Barrier Busting – DCLG crowdsourcing blockages to local action with a WordPress based site. Via @simond
Tax protest turns Vodafone’s smile upside down – This is what happens when you use social media when everyone hates you.
Let Us Pay – One of the best summaries of the woes of the newspaper business I have come across.
Social media and the future of the public sector – Great notes on social tech for internal use from @jiiiii
Wikileaks FAQ – Useful resource on the issues raised by Wikileaks.
13 measures of success for government digital teams – Good stuff on evaluation of online activity from Stephen Hale
expertnet – "The United States General Services Administration (GSA) and the White House Open Government Initiative are soliciting your feedback on a concept for next generation citizen consultation, namely a government-wide software tool and process to elicit expert public participation"

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 October 30th through December 10th

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.

Bookmarks for July 11th through July 16th

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

How to work with online communities at Helpful Technology – "But there are many other ways to build relationships, and lots more experience to share. To help explore this further, I’m helping to convene Meet The Communities, a free, one-off event probably in Central London during September, bringing together some of the leading online communities with the government clients, PR & digital agencies for an afternoon of storytelling and speednetworking."
App Inventor and the culture wars – O’Reilly Radar – "Creativity–whether the creativity of others or your own–is what makes life worthwhile, and enabling creativity is a heroic act. Google has built a culture around enabling others' creativity, and that's worth celebrating. "
The Big Society – the evidence base – "Building on David Kane’s blog-post on the numbers behind the Big Society, the NCVO research team is keen to explore in greater depth the evidence behind this important policy agenda which emphasises the need to transform the relationship between citizens and the state."
Should Governments Develop iPhone Apps? – "No, governments should not develop iPhone apps, the community should."
Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications – "With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave."
WordPress Plugins to Reduce Load-time : Performancing – Doubt my blog will ever run into performance problems due to traffic, but some interesting stuff here nonetheless.
BBC – dot.Rory: Martha’s manifesto – "But it's hard to see how the pledge of universal web access for the UK workforce – which may well be backed by the prime minister later today – can be fulfilled without some government money."
UK Government Goes Social for Budget Cuts: Do Not Hold Your Breath – "Once again, this is the unavoidable asymmetry of government 2.0 in action: it is easier (and certainly more pressworthy) to call for ideas on channels that government controls, rather than to gather them where they already are."
How Local Government can do Facebook « The Dan Slee Blog – Great roundup and hints and tips from Dan.
CycleStreets: UK-wide Cycle Journey Planner and Photomap – "CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists."

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 3rd through June 7th

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

Armchair Auditor – Nice clean and simple example of what can be done with open government spending data by @adrianshort
Supreme Court’s untendered website cost revealed – "You need to ask yourself whether £360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result – with better functionality – for 95% less."
Why I’m fed up of talking about social media, really – "Sure it’s great that lots of councils are interested in social media and what it can do for their communications. But what is really starting to annoy me is that too many councils are asking the wrong questions."
Zotero | Home – "Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources." – via @jjn1
Local Data wiki – Great idea to create a wiki explaining opendata to local government types.
Centre for Digital Citizenship – "The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area."
Yammer Introduces Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Integration – Potentially significant move.
So You Want to Switch to Android…One Man’s iPhone to Nexus One Migration – "Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users."
Publishing itemised local authority expenditure – advice for comment | data.gov.uk – "The Prime Minister has made a specific commitment that new items of local government spending over £500 be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011" – and here's how to do it.
Good and bad transparency – Great post from Steph on the implications of opening up government data.

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 30th through May 14th

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

Should the Public Sector pay for Content Management Systems? « Carl’s Notepad – [with open source] "You will still need to consider the integration aspects but open source products are far more likely to integrate (openness is key) then the big supplier products (no motivation to integrate)."
Office 2010: the SharePoint factor – "The simple conclusion then is that to make sense of Office 2010 you need SharePoint 2010. The snag is that SharePoint is not something to roll out casually. Although it has a huge number of interesting features, it is also complex and easy to break. "
No Overall Control – a Future State of ICT – "To really address the gap between people in ICT and people who work in the Business (people outside of ICT) you actually need to start moving the competencies that IT Professionals have into the Business."
The Fate of the Semantic Web – "While many survey participants noted that current and emerging technologies are being leveraged toward positive web evolution in regard to linking data, there was no consensus on the technical mechanisms and human actions that might lead to the next wave of improvements – nor how extensive the changes might be."
tecosystems » I Love WordPress But… – "the reasons we self-host our WordPress instances are being eliminated at an accelerating rate"
Meatball Wiki – "Meatball is a community of active practitioners striving to teach each other how to organize people using online tools."
Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services – ReadWriteCloud – "Amazon is quietly pursuing the multi-billion dollar federal cloud computing market, intensifying an already fast accelerating sales and marketing effort by Google, Microsoft and a host of others."
What’s Wrong With CSS – "Most of all, what I've learned from this exercise in site theming is that CSS is kind of painful. I fully support CSS as a (mostly) functional user interface Model-View-Controller. But even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice."
WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM – "People can enter a contact form on your site, and the lead goes straight into Salesforce CRM: no more copy pasting lead info, no more missing leads: each and every one of them is in Salesforce.com for you to follow up."
A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Examples – Nice resource. Some great examples in here.
Headshift Projects: Projects by Sector – Nice collection of social software case studies.

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.

I wrote about the Transformed by You project, run jointly between Kent and Medway Councils, here. By all accounts it was a great event, and thanks to the great social reporting efforts of David Wilcox, we can all get a feel for how it went.

The evaluation of the process has been published openly, and makes for an interesting read:

Great that this stuff is being shared out in the open! You can follow further progress on the project, and innovation generally in Kent, on the iNews blog.

Innovation in government is a topic that I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about recently. More soon, when I get round to it.

Tag: localgovweb

Link roundup

What I’ve been reading

What I’ve been reading

Bookmarks for December 12th through December 30th

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

Bookmarks for June 3rd through June 7th

Transformed by You evaluation