Public Strategist

The trouble with best practices is that they worked yesterday. Jean Russell (via Valdis Krebs)

Update:  Since posting this this morning, I have had two people contact me from the Guardian – one in a comment to this post and one by email.  As a result, I am reassured that what I experienced was a bug they are keen to fix rather than indifference to the context in which Guardian material [...]

Here’s a small cautionary tale of unintended consequences. It explains why the particularly eagle eyed will have seen a post on the blog this morning which quickly disappeared – though not quite quickly enough to stop it propagating round the web. Over the weekend, I installed the new Guardian wordpress plugin, more out of curiosity than because [...]

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.

All in all, this is a splendid and positive step forward, illustrating how a little bit of imagination coupled with a little bit of ingenuity can create new possibilities. But there is always room to be better still, and I have a doubt, a reflection, and a couple of niggles.

The writer already knows what he or she is trying to communicate. The only way to judge writing, and thereby improve it, is to learn from people who are confused by it, who draw the wrong conclusion. You don’t assume that they failed, quite the opposite, you try to learn how you failed. And then [...]

In the spirit of paying attention to what I am paying attention to, I can’t help noticing that emails are still feeling oppressive. Dave Pollard has the answer: To all employees: Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have [...]

How much time am I prepared to spend working. Within that, what’s the most important thing I need to do, and how much time should I commit to doing it. Iterate until time is accounted for. Of course in the real world that needs to take account of other people’s needs and preferences – but it also leads pretty forcibly to the conclusion that responding to every clamour for attention from emails and meetings is a rapid route to perdition.

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.

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 [...]