Public Strategist

A digital citizenry isn’t interested in talking to an analogue government
David Eaves 
(h/t Martin Stewart Weeks)

In the 1970s, there were three changes of government.
In the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, there was one.
This is how they did things in 1974 – the combination of constitutional theory, soap opera and gossip column in this account by the prime minister’s private secretary is quite extraordinary. But the two elections of 1974 represented the [...]

Listening looks easy, but it’s not simple. Every head is a world
Lauren Currie

Steph Gray has raised the interesting question of what should happen to public sector social media activity during the election campaign which will be upon us in the next couple of months:
When the General Election is called, and government enters the pre-election phase known as purdah, I’m going to suspend my personal blogging and tweeting at least [...]

Two conversations, with smart people talking about difficult and interesting things.
The day before yesterday, we were in a pub. It was crowded and noisy, and barely possible to hear from one end of the group to the other. But the discussion was lively and sustained, ideas were shared, thoughts developed.
Last night, a more spontaneous conversation [...]

Yesterday in Malmo, the e-government ministers of the EU had a meeting and, as is their wont, issued a declaration.  As I have made clear before, I am not a fan of the term ‘e-government’, which I think tends to distract rather than illuminate, and nor am I a member of the esoteric group of [...]

Designing user interfaces is almost always harder than it looks. Designing the user interface of government is an enormous challenge, but getting it right can yield enormous benefits.
Ed Felten

A long time ago, I used to give a lot of presentations about something called e-government, and particularly e-government strategy. After doing that for a while, I became increasing convinced that that the language of e-government left a lot to be desired, mainly because it had too many connotation of separateness. e-Government was something done [...]

As expected, there is now a video of Howard Rheingold’s Reboot Britain presentation – scroll down the thumbnails on the right, his is the last one (though there is lots of good stuff along the way worth being diverted by).  I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but have seen enough to confirm my suspicion [...]

Months can go by without encountering a single guru, then before you know it, three come along in a single week (actually there were more, but they were so thick on the ground that some I merely brushed past on staircases, rather than hearing them speak).
Second of the three was Howard Rheingold, famous as the [...]