web – Page 5 – Dave Briggs

Sharing and flexibility

September 19, 2010

Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website.

Go read the whole thing, but he summarises:

So what have we learned?

People blogging about what they are up to is dead handy. Stephen and Jimmy writing their posts, me reading them, has saved you thousands of pounds. Direct cause and effect.

Having the flexibility to embed stuff is awesome. Insist on it next time you buy a CMS. Hats off to the guys at Eduserv for really coming through for us on this one. We couldn’t put pages together like this and this and this without it.

The growing availability of embeddable stuff is way cool. I’m excited about what else we might be able to achieve without dev work – like page ratings using Bazaarvoice and forums using Talki.

We all need to think differently now. Few things we might want our website to do are going to be unique to us. Gov webbies, and suppliers of government web services, need to adapt and thoroughly check out 3rd party plugins before embarking on any kind of jiggery-bespokery. Why pay for our own learning curve when others have already been through it?

My take (which pretty much repeats what Neil has said:

People sharing stuff via blogs is good and has measurable impact.
In whatever you do, being flexible and open means you can make the most of developments in technology, or whatever.

Bookmarks for August 5th through August 11th

August 11, 2010

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

Splashpath – “Splashpath is a free service for Leisure Operators to create, update and communicate swimming pool timetables”
The Value of Transparency Is At The Boundary between Government and Society – “Open government is not a way to outsource problem solutions to others.”
More on Apps for Elephants | Public Strategist – Further exposition from Stefan on the ‘should gov develop mobile apps?’ debate.
Devour – “Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.”
Don’t Get Fireballed | brown blog – Nice guide to protecting a WordPress site from traffic overload.
Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft – Looks interesting and cool, though not sure I fully understand it
Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992 – “HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.”
10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization – Handy list.
UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech – “The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.”
Crowdsourcing Is Far From Easy for Government – “Once again, this case proves the disconnect between engaging citizens (and voters) and engaging government employees. For open government to work, both aspects need to be addressed and possibly synchronized.”

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 17th through July 3rd

July 3, 2010

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

Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean – "But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead."
Newsroom: the backstory – "Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too."
What do 25% cuts look like? Like this….. « Whitehall Watch – "There is zero chance cuts of this magnitude can be implemented without affecting “front line services”."
Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software – "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."
How to Secure Your WordPress Site From Getting Hacked: WPSecurityLock – Useful site.
9 signs you know you shouldn’t bother with innovation – Great stuff as always from James Gardner. How many of these can you tick off for your organisation?
Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It? – "I'm often amazed at the lack of courage exhibited by so-called leaders who profess to value innovation."
When Public Servants Make the Difference – "However, as one of the secret sauces of Singapore’s success is trusting its own employees, so almost all gov 2.0 success stories in the Western world share the same ingredient, i.e. they come from the intuition and the willingness to innovate of people who work in government."
Enterprise 2.0 2010 – Enterprise 2.0 TV – Videos from the keynote speeches at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Some good stuff here.
A timeline of open government data – Great work Tim Davies – this is really interesting!

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

May 14, 2010

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.

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