An online notebook
Is it really 13 days since I last posted one of these? Terrifying. Still, it means plenty of links to share. #
Rich Pope: Government is not an appā¬ #
Tom Loosemore: What we mean when we say āBe Boldāā¬ #
10 principles for the design and delivery of greener servicesā¬ #
Mark O’Neill: Five quick things for the digital futureā¬ #
More Pope:
How Rushmoor Borough Council set out to understand and resolve the issues preventing an effective and efficient freedom of information request serviceā¬. #
Have ordered a copy of Platformlandā¬, Richard Pope’s book on government digital services. Am looking forward to reading it and nodding. Lots of people have their copies already and seem to be enjoying it. #
Work on the rebrandā¬ is progressing – there’s not a lot holding me back now really, except nerves. Which is daft! Who cares, after all? Only me really. #
I use a Blue Yetiā¬ microphone at my desk, and it really does have a positive impact on audio quality, which is great. But it also takes up a lot of space, so I have ordered a microphone armā¬ to see if that helps declutter things a bit. #
Needed another browser (I like having different accounts in completely different browsers, rather than multiple windows of the same browser. I get easily confused!) So I went for the DuckDuckGoā¬ browser. It’s really good – nice and fast, and all the privacy stuff is good although I’m not overly worried about that stuff. Definitely recommended. #
Have added Google Analytics to this blog, via the Sitekit WordPress plugin. I guess it will be interesting to see the numbers, but it isn’t really why I do this, so maybe I’ll switch it off again once the novelty wears off. #
Audree Fletcher posted a little while back about Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problemsā¬:
I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what youāre going to get for your money. Itās what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.
But it only works when you are really certain that the thing youāre buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes youāre seeking.
Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.
Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.
I posted an article yesterday about writing good strategies, based on some of the work I have been doing lately. Also copy and pasted it into LinkedIn, and will send it out on a newsletter at some point too. #
A lovely chat with Jamesā¬ this morning, rather out of the blue. It was great to catch up and share stories about what we’ve been up to for the last 10 years, or however long it was since we last spoke. We talked a lot about online communities – particularly of practice – and shared a bunch of experiences and ideas. He reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about, like the GDS community development handbookā¬. #
The community development frameworkā¬ sets out the things that communities need really well: people, programme, and platform. I do struggle with the latter, nothing seems to work terribly well, particularly when it comes to making it easy to extract knowledge out of discussions and into some kind of searchable archive. I’ve not expressed this very well, but I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that a large language model type thing might actually be useful for. #
Have just come across this great blogā¬ from a local government technology person. They don’t mention their name on their blog, so I won’t do it on mine. Well worth a read and a subscribe though! #
Richard Popeā¬ has a book in the worksā¬! Exciting! #
Richard Pope has been working on a new social website for MySociety, called GroupsNearYou.com. Here’s how he explains it on his blog:
For all the talk of social networking people forget that for a whole host of internet users have been doing this kind of thing for years using really the really the < web 1.0 technology of email groups and phpBB forums (sw4people, Urban75 and Hern Hill Forum blog are just a few local to me).
They can make a real difference to the local community aspects of peopleās lives – discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever. Many of the people who run these groups (especially the email based ones) are often not that internet savvy, but have found simple tools that let them connect with people where they live that have a shared interest.
The problem is, unless someone tells you directly about one, they are all but invisible.
To this ends, Iāve been building a site for mySociety called (sticking to the ādoes what it says on the tinā naming convention) GroupsNearYou.com that is aiming to map the locations and details of these groups and, importantly, help people find ones relevant them.
At the moment the site is pretty sparsely populated, but I am sure that will change in the very near future. Making decent websites available to community groups is a topic I am greatly interested in, but equally important is making them accessible and easy to find. Great work, Richard!