This is how conversations work, or rather how one conversation played out on twitter this morning. Tricky subject, no right answer, constructive discussion.* But perhaps most important of all, those issues are being discussed in public for a government proof of concept which hasn’t yet even been launched. It is that which is more radical [...]
When I was 17, my first proper paid job was in the public library just down the road from the Elephant and Castle. It was the first time I had come across large print books. They had their own section, and there was a huge demand for them. But though it was much more intensely [...]
Every person and every organisation has some form of reality distortion field. Some are more severe than others, and according to Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft has a particularly severe version of the problem: The Redmond Reality Distortion Field: The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of [...]
I have written a couple of times about the gap I see between the brilliance of hack days, as exemplified by Rewired State, and the need to build customer needs and user experience into the mix: These projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use case, but they [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some barriers across a footpath as a simple illustration of how easy it is to skew public decision making if the question is defined too narrowly. Since then I have come across a number of things which add up to much clearer thinking on this than I managed [...]
This is not a post about the barrier I came across as I walked to the post office on Saturday. I had to turn into the path in the picture, which takes a 210° hairpin to the right, followed by a 110° turn back to the left – it’s sharper and more awkward than the [...]
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 [...]
I have had a blog post half written about transparency and opening government data for a couple of weeks, but the words aren’t yet saying what I want them to – it needs a bit more focused concentration than I have been able to give it. While I have been musing, a new and superb [...]