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 [...]
Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. Humphry Davy, quoted by Brian Cox, the Voltaire Lecture, 6 April 2010
Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. Clay Shirky
In a world of increasingly open government data, who is going to create the services? Brian Hoadley has a powerful go at the answer: Those who campaign for the release of Government data seem to fall into a few major camps: Those who want more access to information because it will inform their work – [...]
If the people who read this blog are the sort of people I think read this blog, few will have paused over the title of this post. For better or worse, people who read this are people who are comfortable in an online world. They will shop online, bank online, talk to their friends online, [...]
Organisations cannot learn not to be surprised by the future. They can learn not to be surprised that they are surprised by the future. Paraphrased from comments by Ian Livingston.
Yesterday’s my Public Services conference, organised by the redoubtable Patient Opinion, started with an arresting analogy from James Munro. It is well known that the iron bridge of Ironbridge was the first of its kind in the world. It was less well known (at least to me), that it was assembled as if the pieces [...]
It was a mistake to have breakfast with William Heath. In his charming way, he took one of my long-held ideas, held it up to the light, and found it wanting. Worse still – and equally characteristically – the challenge was as powerful as it was simple. I have argued for some time that there [...]
This time next year, it will be difficult to tell the difference between a website and a mobile application. Premasagar Rose, quoting an unnamed participant at Over the Air
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 [...]