Some evenings on my way home from work, I play a small private game of chicken. Now I have played it for the last time. If there are too many people at the bus stop – and no, I don’t know how many makes too many – that’s a sign that the gap between buses [...]
There has been a lot of work in recent years on ways of improving the process of public consultation. It’s not something about which I have any great expertise or direct involvement, but I am conscious of great efforts to produce consultation material in forms which are not just useful and accessible themselves, but which [...]
Paul Clarke had been on a journey. Well two, actually. The first was to get a bit of routine business done with government, updating the photograph on his driving licence. He has written a blow by blow account of how that didn’t work the way it should have done. Follow the link and read it [...]
As services improve, merge and become virtual, they disappear into the cloud. Which is fine when it’s fine, but sometimes the cloud bursts. We are, we hope, creating better ways of getting things done, but we are also unintentionally and perhaps unavoidably creating new ways for systems and services to fail. Those potential failures need [...]
Even if people are technologically available, it doesn’t mean they are behaviorally available. Helge Tennø cited by Dan McQuillan
Truncating the axes is the oldest trick in the book, so the story this chart is telling is not quite as dramatic as the initial visual impression, but that story is still striking and important. The proportion of internet usage from mobile devices is tiny, less than 3%. That’s almost certainly an understatement, since the [...]
Some slightly random visual aids Lots of data packed in to a five minute video, which really brings home how much and how many things are going on (via Transform). Lots of the numbers are now getting on for a year old, which makes some of them look quaintly old fashioned. Where the video has [...]
I am sitting at home waiting for a parcel, the unloved and unglamorous side effect of internet living. I know it left Sheffield last night. I know it got sorted in Birmingham. I know it got to Croydon. I know it’s on a van on its way to me. The only thing I don’t know [...]
There was an interesting article by Marcus du Sautoy in the Guardian on Saturday about the future of the book. That’s a perfectly straightforward statement – or might have been had it been written a few years ago. But now ‘article’, ‘in’ and ‘on Saturday’ are all a bit problematic. On the printed page, it [...]
It is important to note that we will only accept printed forms for registration, please do not return these forms electronically as they will not be processed. The electronic versions are for your convenience and will need to be printed before return. From an email received today. Not, as it happens, about a government service.