Public Strategist

Innovation requires failure. @rufflemuffin

Innovators are disobedient, especially in government. Andrea di Maio

We need to recognise the need for clarity of service design, for clear leadership of service design and delivery as a function of government, making customer understanding a central part of the job for everybody who has anything to do with any of this – and for all of that to to be done with a sense of openness and a recognition of the value of co-creation. That’s a revolution of culture, leadership and innovation which wasn’t on the agenda ten years ago.

We are all innovators now. In Whitehall, there is to be a new assessment model behind the programme of capability reviews, with one of the changes being ‘challenging departments to innovate’: A new element in the ‘delivery’ segment – ‘Innovate and improve delivery’ – challenges departments to develop a culture in which innovation can flourish. [...]

Updated 27 August to include video and additional links. Last weekend’s Young Rewired State really seems to have caught people’s imagination, with lots of commentary from the hackers who created the projects, the observers who watched them present their ideas and from people who weren’t there at all (but who rather wished they were).  I [...]

A couple of hours this afternoon at the mini-Googleplex in Victoria, watching the teenagers of Young Rewired State present their hacks.  It was an impressive show, not just for the ideas, all of which were good ones, or for the clarity and self-confidence with which they were presented, but because of the focus on doing [...]

The Australian Government has just announced a Government 2.0 Taskforce, which seems to be getting some of the same sorts of reactions as our own Power of Information Taskforce – that it is an establishment fix, that it needs to deliver instant radicalism, that it is a huge opportunity ready to be taken.  I know [...]

You hug your data.  You don’t want to let it go until you have made a beautiful web site for it.  Well I want to suggest that, yes make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the unadulterated data, we have to ask for raw data now. Tim Berners-Lee’s impassioned [...]

Not every elderly person with a computer has a child able to do system support, and not everybody who could benefit from that support is an elderly person – digital exclusion is a much broader and more pervasive challenge than that.

the omnipresence of mobiles is an unavoidable feature of daily life, but we have scarcely begun to think through the implications of the transition connected devices are making from being big tethered things to being small wandering things