I wrote about the voices of government last month – five categories of public sector bloggers, with the fifth largely empty. Step forward John Duncan who blogs and twitters in his role as UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. In my earlier post, I had the FCO bloggers in category 3 – People [...]
The VRM challenge is not just that information is held in big databases. It is that every bit of process – human, clerical, IT system, legal framework, behavioural expectations – is currently designed, or rather has grown up over the years without very much overall design, on the assumption that data is to be found in databases.
The bloggers of government are an impressive bunch. So much so, that it’s easy to overlook just how skewed a sample of the population they still represent. I have been thinking a bit recently about who does – and who doesn’t – blog from government, and have come up with five categories: People whose job [...]
The Tower 09 conference a week ago was interesting , a slightly smaller follow on to the bigger and brasher event a year ago. It was a curious event – quite a lot of good stuff, but in a format which feels increasingly old fashioned, and with a very strange sense of its place in [...]
It is all too easy to forget, from the lofty heights of public strategy, that public services are about people. It is all too easy to forget that although we are all users of public services, that there are some among us for whom public services are not something at the margin but are the [...]
One consequence of the invention of printing was the democratisation of reading, the reverberations of which are still being felt. One consequence of the invention of universal self-publication is the democratisation of writing, the reverberations of which are only just beginning to be felt at all.
Great to have been one of the “govvy people” allowed in to see the show – it was deeply thought provoking at a number of different levels. I can’t afford to be as cheerfully dismissive of the government (which anyway simply does not exist as a singular noun) as many of the creative minds at the event, those of us who are in government certainly do need to respond to the challenge.
Ed Felten spells out the difference between outreach and transparency: Outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets [...]
On the substance, it looks first rate: it has a clear set of recommendations, each of which is cogently argued.
But it isn’t written as a hook to pull in somebody who doesn’t already know why they should be interested.
The publication of the advert for the new Director of Digital Engagement has prompted an outburst of commentary, with two of the most interesting contributions both coming from Steph Gray, who is systematically crowdsourcing the real requirements of the job. And of course that process works both ways: it makes visible what the crowd thinks [...]