Five for Friday (30/6/17)

Quite a mixture of stuff this week – plenty to dig into over the weekend. Interesting job at GDS, promoting the use of gov.uk Verify in local government. You have until the end of Sunday 2nd July to apply –…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: An Open Letter to Software Suppliers – 13 Ways to Help the Public Sector to the Cloud – @copley_rich Why the obsession with “coding” misses the point – from @jjn1 “Whatsapp…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Redefining the Digital Divide | @helenmilner The system is failing, hack the system – via @annemcx The Four Freedoms – wonderful piece on #opensource by @photomatt The dangerous appeal of the…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Taming the Python – geting started programming on your Raspberry Pi Battle for the planet of the APIs Returning to Free Software: A Guide Robots and Robber Barons – NYTimes.com via…

How in-the-browser software should work

I wrote recently about my growing unease with the addiction we have with ever greater convenience with our computing over the necessity of control. A lot of this is driven by cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS). The convenience of SaaS is…

Codebunk

Codebunk looks like a neat in the browser editor for writing and testing code. Particularly useful, I think, for those learning to program. Here’s a video that demonstrates how it works.

Living on a cloud

While despatched on a mission of digital mercy a few weeks ago Mr Briggs (of this parish) and I fell to comparing our computers. Or rather he fell to ridiculing my rather ancient Samsung laptop (seven years old I think, it doesn’t like to process video, original power supply fell apart and it now boasts a rather lovely Maplin back up device). Apple fans do tend to look upon me with fear tinged with pity when I unpack the machine.

Yammer time

One of the most talked about sessions at last weekend’s LocalGovCamp was about Yammer. (For those who don’t know, Yammer is basically a private version of Twitter with knobs on that works within an organisation.) Tom Phillips, who led the…

Bookmarks for August 11th through August 18th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. OnePeople › Open source matters to open government. Really. – "Both DiMaio and Caudill make the mistake of believing that open source is about making cheap bits. Instead, it’s a…

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…

Bookmarks for April 19th through April 23rd

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. Open innovation, why bother? – 100% Open – "…if open innovation is to deliver sustainable business advantage then we need a better understanding of what motivates contributors to these initiatives,…

Bookmarks for April 11th through April 16th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. A New Approach to Printing – “a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.” Governments and Citizens: You Don’t Own…

Organising yourself with Evernote

Evernote is a nice little app that I have mentioned a couple of times before. It’s a note taking and organising tool, which exists in three main forms: a website, a desktop application for your computer, and an iPhone app.…

Importance of mobile

Mobile platforms are going to be ever-increasingly important to government, not least in terms of communicating and consulting with citizens – especially in terms of engaging with the disadvantaged who are more likely to have a mobile phone than a…