polcasm – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for January 10th through January 24th

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

#UKGC11: Flickr, Wikipedia and Open Streetmap for local authorities – Great write up of an interesting session from @abeeken
Reworking the public sector | Public sector pm – Notes on a great topic at #ukgc11
Uk GovCamp 2011 | Partridgej’s Blog – Nice summary of the #police discussion at #ukgc11 from @jiiiii
The Plan is not the Objective – Superb stuff from @curiousc on agile policy making talks at #ukgc11
Considering PaaS – Fabulously useful post on cloud platform stuff from @cote
6 ways to make open innovation easier – 100% Open – Great tips.
Public Data Corporation to free up public data and drive innovation – Interesting. Not least because I'm not convinced there's much money to be made by anyone here – certainly not by small suppliers anyway.
Transport’s £2.7m spend on online game – Shame – a potentially good idea made ridiculous by spending too much money on it.
My GovCamp wishlist (and yours) – Thanks to Simon for sharing his ideas for this year's GovCamp.
How To Build An Online Community – The Ultimate List of Resources (Updated) – Great list of resources from Rich Millington on building online communities- vital reading.
As VLC for iPhone, iPad Pulled from App Store, What’s the Future for GPL Apps? – Interesting post on whether open sources licences like the GPL are incompatible with Apple (and maybe other) app stores T&Cs.

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 3rd through October 19th

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.

Almost live transparency from Greater Manchester Police

A really interesting experiment is happening in Manchester today, thanks to the local police force.

Greater Manchester Police are, according to their website,

publishing details of every incident that it deals with on Twitter to allow the public to see what officers at one of the largest UK forces face on a daily basis.

This video explains more:

You can follow all the action on the GMP website, where they are aggregating together the outputs from three different Twitter streams, or just get the latest from @gmpolice.

As I said, interesting stuff, and a great use of the scale that social media tools like Twitter offer in terms of quickly publishing a lot of information. Imagine doing something like this through traditional web publishing tools!

It’s also a great example of a public service using transparency proactively and positively. It doesn’t always have to be bad news.

The internet is not another channel

I had a pleasant day last Wednesday at the joint NPIA and ACPO event on ‘Policing 2.0’, at the invitation of Nick Keane.

(A quick word in praise of Nick. I have known him for over 3 years now, and in all that time, he has been quietly plugging away at the NPIA, whispering in ears, promoting ideas, talking with others. When things weren’t quite going his way, he never gave up, or had a tantrum, but quietly got on with things. All that effort is now bearing fruit, and the police should be grateful that they have Nick. Every organisation should have a Nick – in fact, they probably do. Find him, or her, as soon as you can, and treasure them.)

I presented a mid-morning slot titled ‘Whose Police is it, anyway?’ – my attempt at a mildly amusing reference to the recent MyPolice saga, which has now thankfully been resolved in a sensible way.

I won’t go into the details of the farrago – the links above will fill you in – but the one lasting impression I got was that quite a lot of people don’t take the internet, and those that inhabit it, terribly seriously. This is a huge mistake and a massive missed opportunity for those that take this view.

This tends to take two main forms. One is that any digital element of a project is left until the last minute before it is considered, meaning that things are inevitably rushed, and not as thought-through as they could be.

The second form is, as I alluded to in the title of this post, that online is considered as just another channel. The fact is, though, that the internet is not a channel. The internet is not the same as your newsletter. It is not the same as your advertisement. It is not the same as your poster.

The internet is a big, important thing. In my presentation, I drew on Stephen Fry‘s analogy from the Digital Britain summit last year, when he described the internet as a city. A place where people meet socially, where they go to work, where they play games together, create wonderful things, share knowledge, thought and jokes.

Like any city, it’s also a place where bad things happen. But like a city, the answer to that is not to shut the bad places down, or build wire fences around them, but to try and root out the bad people and convince them of the error of their ways.

Therefore, like any place where people are so active, they care about the internet. It matters to them. It isn’t something that should be disregarded as a plaything for geeks, or somewhere that only sad, lonely people use to find friends (it is, of course, both of those things, but not exclusively).

Open source wouldn’t happen without the internet. Wikipedia wouldn’t happen without the internet. MySociety wouldn’t happen without the internet. Data.gov.uk wouldn’t happen without the internet. Guido Fawkes wouldn’t happen without the internet. Of course these things all have their flaws, but the fact that they happen at all, and have the impact they do, is a remarkable testament to the culture of the net, which every individual and every organisation has something to learn from.

Here are my slides – a few won’t make much sense, but they were all trying to make one point or another, some more profane than others.

Whose Police is it, anyway?

View more presentations from Dave Briggs.