socitm – Dave Briggs

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.

What I’ve been reading

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

openkent :: home – "Open Kent is where public sector bodies in Kent can publish information about the services they provide."
How to do a Crowd | Innovator Inside – For crowds, read communities, groups, whatever. Good stuff.
Shabby PR from SOCITM « Simon Wakeman – "As a PR man I’m well versed in the technique in play here – create a stir around headline grabbing stat or two then ride to the rescue with a carefully pitched product or service to solve the various woes created by aforementioned stat. "
Government corporate websites in eye-popping 3D – Fascinating to watch this develop.
Local Government please don’t sack the connectors. « Podnosh – "So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

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.

Productivity, responsiveness and lighter weight

I rather like this, from Gartner’s Mark McDonald:

While the future will require IT to deliver enterprise specific strategies and initiatives there are a few considerations to keep mind:

Productivity is different than efficiency and those differences matter

It is better for IT to be responsive rather than just being “agile”

Leveraging the capabilities of lighter weight technologies and how they impact IT

Jos Creese new Socitm President

Hampshire County Council’s Head of IT Jos Creese is the President of Socitm for the next 12 months, and if this quote is anything to go by, he seems an ideal man for the job:

IT professionals must carve out a role as agents of change, helping to re-shape the face of public services. This means involvement in policy formulation and service redesign, not technology. It also means taking risks and being at the forefront of change, rather than keeping busy in the data centre.

As reported on UKauthorITy.com.

Bookmarks for April 5th through April 10th

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

Social Media Security – "We have found a huge lack of accurate information around security issues and awareness of social media. This website aims to help educate users of social media of the threats, risks and privacy concerns that go with using them."
E-government is not a financial cure-all – "Whoever is in charge after 6 May, I expect the drive towards "smarter government" (or whatever catch phrase replaces it) to continue. There are simply no other tools in the box. But whoever is in charge will avidly wish someone had made a bolder start while the going was good."
bantApp.com: Bant Diabetes Monitoring App for the iPhone and iPod Touch – Interesting iphone app for diabetes management, via @robertbrook
Two models of open innovation – "Based on our recent experience of working on open innovation projects, and also building upon a great paper by Kevin Boudreau and Karim Lakhani, we have concluded that there are two distinct ways of doing open innovation – creating competitive markets or collaborative communities"
Let government screw up – "I have the opportunity to speak to groups across government about the benefits, challenges and potential costs of social media. In the face of institutional anxiety, I’ve argued that social media is a positive environment that encourages experimentation. In fact, online users are willing to accept mis-steps and stumbles from government organizati0ns simply because it demonstrates initiative and ambition, if not expertise."
Project Spaces: A Format for Surfacing New Projects – home – "The event format I'm calling Project Spaces has emerged from working with various collaborators to facilitate events for communities actively engaged and committed to finding better ways to do things."
Can Open Office Escape From Under A Cloud? – "I do see a future for Open Office in the enterprise — one that’s closely tied to integration with collaboration, content management, and business processes and facilitated by the likes of Oracle and IBM."
A democratic view of social media behaviours – Interesting action research post from Catherine – plenty to chew on here.
Digital exclusion, porn and games – "I wonder if – as with mobile phones – there’s a certain, influential generation that see the technology as being more than just a technology. And instead, a marker for a whole way of life they just haven’t accepted yet."
Social media measurement – Great stuff from Stuart Bruce – debunking a few myths and some marketing BS.

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 March 30th through April 5th

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

The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky – Awesome stuff from Shirky.
Reflecting on my MSc research by Michele Ide-Smith – "By researching the attitudes and perceptions of authorities and citizens I hope to gain a better understanding of perceived barriers, threats and opportunities of using social media for community engagement"
Cinch – "Cinch is a free and easy way to create and share audio, text and photo updates using your phone or computer. Cinch enables you to capture and report on your experiences in a way that simple text just can't do. Using a simple interface, you can make and broadcast your content creations through Facebook, Twitter, CinchCast.com and more."
The State of the Internet Operating System – O’Reilly Radar – "Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?"
Penval’s Digital Inclusion Manifesto – Well done Paul Nash. This is what the digital inclusion debate needs – proper, thought through ideas. Genuinely constructive contributions. Not just people bleating about the problems.
tecosystems » Forking, The Future of Open Source, and Github – Is the future of open source going to be based on communities such as Apache and Eclipse or will it be based on companies that sell open source? Neither.
Dr Dennis Kimbro & his views on recruitment – Really interesting and thought provoking piece on talent management, and attitudes to it, in local government.
In quest of simplicty – "We expect IT to be complex and costly, but the lesson of the past 5 years in IT – where we’ve seen the consumerization of enterprise IT (“enterprise” is often a coy way of saying “this has to be complex and expensive – no questions!”) – is that IT can be both simple and cheap."
Law and social media – dull but important – "Social media throws up issues of privacy and identity which are far more complex when you have a complete record of someone’s time online and a also a need to balance the personal with the professional roles of an individual. "
Powerful petitions with real teeth set to bite – "Local people can now demand their councils take action on underperforming schools and hospitals, drink disorder, anti-social behaviour and other concerns under new rules giving real power to local petitions, announced Communities Secretary John Denham today."

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 March 18th through March 20th

[Something is going wrong with this again. For some reason this hadn’t been posted before now.]

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

Embracing Government 2.0: Leading transformative change in the public sector (PDF) – PDF warning! Link to paper from Grant Thornton on gov 2.0 – some interesting case studies.
Government webpage for every citizen in the race to create a paperless society – Times Online – “All public services could be delivered online within four years under an ambitious pledge by Gordon Brown to create a paperless state and save billions of pounds”
What is eSpace? | NHS CFH eSpace – “eSpace is a community based online collaboration tool dedicated to improving healthcare and wellness by sharing knowledge and experiences of technology enabled change.” via @dominiccampbell
What Is Open Government For? – “It is quite clear that, depending on what is the primary driver to be “open”, the meaning of openness changes, as do the effort put on different aspects of an open government strategy and plan.”
Central government reorganisation squandering millions on IT – “More than £150m was spent on IT by government departments going through a process of restructuring but there is little evidence of any benefits, finds a new NAO report.”
Fake Experts – “It is possible that the most frustrating thing ever is to have to sit through meetings with people who have declared that they’re experts, and then discover that they aren’t.”
The problem of incentives in knowledge work – “I’m struggling with the issue of incentives in organizations trying to promote improved knowledge management and more effective use of new collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, and the like.”
Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative? – Interesting – never mind the tech, how does video fit with the ethos of Wikipedia?
The Problem with Big Data – “He who has the most data wins. Right?”

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 March 8th through March 13th

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

Roundup: Social Media Monitoring Tools – WebWorkerDaily – Useful list of dashboard-like monitoring tools.
It is not about our App, It is about the User’s Data and Context | Zoho Blogs – “…whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context”
Google Apps Marketplace – “The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps.”
Google Reader – Play – “elcome to Google Reader Play, a fun, fast way to browse the most interesting stuff on the web, personalized just for you. We’ll keep track of the things you star, like, or share, and we’ll show you more stuff you’ll like the next time you use Reader Play.”
Plan for Welsh councils to work together collapses – “Local government reorganisation which cuts the number of councils is the only realistic option.”
Crown Copyright switches to Creative Commons – Information World Review – “Click-Use, the licence that for the last decade has authorised anyone to reuse government and Parliamentary information, is to be phased out by May.”
Google – public data – “The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.”
Steve Bridger › Putting your people at the heart of your social media strategy – “This was the title of a talk I gave at the end of February and I think it is important, and frankly, worth repeating over and over.”
Social Media Resources – The Altimeter – Useful wiki, full of lots of social media goodness.
publicSIRO – Public Sector Information Security News – New blog from Ian Cuddy cataloging public sector data losses.

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.

Works starts on skills framework for web professionals

Vicky, from Boilerhouse and Socitm, pops by to tell us about the latest developments with the public sector web professionals network.

On 27 November, Socitm will be holding a workshop as the first stage in a project to define a professional skills framework for people who work on public sector websites.

This is part of it wider initiative to set up a web professionals group for this large and diverse group that includes:

programmers and coders
web developers (with technical skills)
web designers
content managers/editors
social networking experts
measurement/monitoring specialists
web marketers
web managers
customer service or IT heads with web responsibilities
e-communications professionals

The initiative kicked off earlier this year with a meeting called by Socitm and involving web managers and practitioners from local government across the UK, central government departments, the government supersites, and the third sector. Also present were representatives form some existing and past groups formed by webbies, including the Public Sector Web Professionals Group, SPIN and the Scottish Web Forum.

There was general agreement among those present that meeting web practitioners’ professional development needs would in future need more than informal groups, voluntary effort and free networking tools. It was also recognised that defining a skills framework for web practitioners and organising training, development and possibly accreditation around this framework would be a core activity for any professional group formed.

Following this meeting Socitm commissioned research to identify whether any other professional association or skills organisation was already doing or planning to do something similar. Discussions were held with a range of professional and skills organisations in ICT, interactive media, marketing, communications and publishing. We also talked with the CoI and the Government Communications Network about their plans in this area, and made useful contact with the Federal Web Managers Council in the USA. Contact was made with some web networks in the NHS to share and discuss idea, leading to some positive feedback about the potential for webbies in the health sector to join our activity.

At this point, the Socitm agreed in principle to set up a web professionals’ interest group for people involved in any aspect of web management and development. Individuals at any level of seniority or career stage, employed or freelancing in the public or third sectors, or in any organisation working with them would be open to join. The group would then run under the Socitm constitution, with the group electing a chair and officer and developing a programme of activity supported by Socitm’s paid staff. Members would be eligible for the normal benefits of Socitm membership as well as additional benefits exclusive to ‘web members’.

As well as agreeing to set up a group or community for web professionals, Socitm agreed to fund initial development on a skills framework. This is seen a central to the development of a sustainable future programme of activity that will attract web professionals to join and support the group. The workshop on 27 November marks the start of this activity

We are looking for people with experience of managing web teams in the public sector to get involved in this activity. There are a limited number of places available at the workshop, and a wider opportunity to participate in evaluating and offering feedback on the initial framework developed at the workshop.

If you would like to get involved, please complete the form to tell us a little more about your relevant skills and experience, and whether you are willing and able to attend the workshop on 27 November, which will run in London from 1000 – 1600. If by any chance you are unable to access this, email me at vicky.sargent@socitm.net.

We will be publishing the register of those interested in the community library.

Many thanks are due to Paul Canning for his work in getting this activity going, some of you will have been following his blogs on this topic in the CoP and elsewhere.