Steph Gray has raised the interesting question of what should happen to public sector social media activity during the election campaign which will be upon us in the next couple of months:
When the General Election is called, and government enters the pre-election phase known as purdah, I’m going to suspend my personal blogging and tweeting at least [...]
Last week, this blog hit five years and 400 posts, just as it became apparent that blogs are history.
As this momentous milestone approached, there was a flurry of coverage of the latest Pew Internet Project report, on social media and young adults, picking up on the decline of interest in blogging – at least among [...]
I totally respect the need for caution and propriety, after all I was a civil servant, but you can’t on the one hand champion social media in government and on the other seek to manage and control the agenda. It just cannot work, and it won’t.
Jeremy Gould commenting on a post by Dominic Campbell
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 [...]
Two conversations, with smart people talking about difficult and interesting things.
The day before yesterday, we were in a pub. It was crowded and noisy, and barely possible to hear from one end of the group to the other. But the discussion was lively and sustained, ideas were shared, thoughts developed.
Last night, a more spontaneous conversation [...]
In the opening days of 2010, I am reading a collection of essays proclaiming itself to be The Best Technology Writing 2009, every single one of which was written and published in 2008.
It’s a curious book, for several reasons.
The first and most obvious is how very strange it now seems to be reading some of [...]
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 were [...]
Yesterday in Malmo, the e-government ministers of the EU had a meeting and, as is their wont, issued a declaration. As I have made clear before, I am not a fan of the term ‘e-government’, which I think tends to distract rather than illuminate, and nor am I a member of the esoteric group of [...]
As long as your personal information is secret, you don’t even have a privacy problem. It’s only when somebody else knows your personal information that you have a privacy problem
Privacy is the problem you have after you share sensitive information.
When you discover that you might have a socially awkward medical condition and you go to [...]
There are two things I understand about cloud computing.
The first is that it works as an insurance policy. My house might burn down, my computers all get stolen, my hard disks fail simultaneously, and still I will not have lost any of the data I care most about because quietly every night Jungle Disk looks [...]