Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • open data doesn’t empower communities | internet.artizans I’m inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don’t see any of that in the data.gov.uk apps list. The reasons aren’t technical but psychosocial – the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don’t have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.
  • Shelf-stackers in the intranet supermarket (Intranet diary) In the intranet supermarket, we need more than just shelf-stackers. We need intelligent people who care about their customers. products, keen to find out if customers can find products easily. We need people with the good business sense to only stock what the customers want, eager and ready to tidy up messy aisles and to be more questioning about stacking whatever they are given, wherever they fancy.
  • Finding the best ideas in the world | Freedom to Tinker Visitors to their idea marketplace were presented with the question “Which is the more important action we need to take in education today?” and two ideas from the pool. The visitors voted for one of the ideas, and then another pair of ideas was presented. This process of pairwise voting continued for as the long as the visitor wished. Also, at any time the visitor could upload an idea which would then go into the pool of ideas to be voted on by others. In this way the idea marketplace allowed the OECD to collect ideas from the community and have the community prioritize them. Both of these steps–collection and prioritization–are needed for a successful “crowdsourcing” of ideas.
  • Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » Towards the intelligent use of human beings Why don’t we do this? Mainly because we’re still operating with a hard-copy, print mindset. Once upon a time we sent one another typed drafts, so the university’s internal mail system resembled a freight-transportation network designed for shipping atoms (as Nicholas Negroponte would put it). The fact that we are now shipping bits ought to have caused us to rethink what we were doing, but it hasn’t. Instead we are just repeating in electronic form what we did with physical typescripts. And it’s daft.
    Another process that happens in any large outfits (and especially in universities) is the organisation of meetings. Getting busy people together can be nightmarishly difficult. Or, rather, it is if you do it the way many organisations do it — by email. I’ve lost count of the number of interminable email exchanges I’ve been involved in where ten people try and agree on a date and time for a meeting, when the obvious way to do it is via an online polling system like that provided by Doodle.
  • Gov 2.0 Andrew Stott
  • Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
    Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential