Saturday was UK Government Barcamp day. A day of fast moving fun, filled with energetic and enthusiastic people who thought that giving up their weekend in the cause of better government was a sensible and desirable thing to do. There was a huge amount of energy on the day, represented and amplified in the twitter [...]
The US Air Force may seem an unlikely source for good guidance on blogging – but they have come up with something thoughtful, well organised and on one piece of paper, which are attributes not to be sneezed at. Found from Global Nerdy (who also offers a PDF version) via Jeremiah Owyang.
Universal McCann has published a study of 17,000 internet users from 29 countries. It’s not about everybody, it’s about people who use the internet every day or every other day. And it’s about how people influence and are influenced by each other. Two key conclusions are that everybody is an influencer and that social influencing [...]
To some extent they confirm what you might have guessed – younger people are more likely to use social media, and their use of the internet is itself more likely to be social – but confirmation is better than speculation, and some of the detail is well worth reflecting on.
We won’t know what all that will be good for until it becomes clearer what it is good for. That’s partly the result of the general chaos affects which afflict weather forecasts, but it is also more specifically a result of our not yet having even thought about how the way the world works is affected by the universal and ubiquitous of powerful but pocket sized network devices.
Government doesn’t find conversation easy. Its communication models tend to be predominantly one to many and it finds the megaphone more comfortable than the ear trumpet.
Martin Stewart Weeks has a question. For the most part, government is not being done in recognizably different ways and certainly not ways that, in any reasonable interpretation of the word, would count as ‘transformation’ . Underlying structures and systems remain largely unchanged. It’s even harder to discern much real shift in underlying culture and [...]
If we in government want to innovate more, we should also behave more like innovators. Says Jeremy Gould, who has just run a Govweb barcamp.
Anybody who has spent any time working in the public sector will have got used to being told how much better everything is in the private sector, and will probably also have learned to brush such comments aside without taking too much notice of them. That’s good because such comments are often ill-informed, but very [...]
Michael Wesch, who produced the Information R/evolution featured in the last post, first came to widespread fame (well, four million views on YouTube, which isn’t far short of the same thing) with The Machine is Us/ing Us. This one does Web 2.0 in under five minutes. Some of the examples assume a basic knowledge of [...]