Company towns

The old streets of Saltaire Village / Paul Stevenson / CC BY 2.0 As you triple the number of employees, their productivity drops by half.* That arresting fact is the starting point for a superb blog post by Dave Gray on the connected company, in which he explores the question of why companies appear to […]

On being private in public

From the random juxtaposition of things in a feed reader come two posts, one human and passionate, the other dry and analytical, each illuminating the other. Here first is Julian Sanchez writing about The Trouble With “Balance” Metaphors: Legal scholar Dan Solove, for instance, argues forcefully that “privacy” is not a monolithic value defined by […]

Separation of powers

“Why”, asked the visiting official from Singapore, “do civil servants have to fill in tax returns?” He was genuinely puzzled. It was 2000, and the world of e-government was still in its infancy, though more advanced in Singapore than most places. His thought was simple. The government pays its staff in the first place, why […]

Cloud burst

As services improve, merge and become virtual, they disappear into the cloud. Which is fine when it’s fine, but sometimes the cloud bursts. We are, we hope, creating better ways of getting things done, but we are also unintentionally and perhaps unavoidably creating new ways for systems and services to fail. Those potential failures need […]

Interesting elsewhere – 31 January 2011

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Open Public Data: Then What? – Part 1 The opening up of public data is a vast, complex, never-ending process that encompasses thousands of different actors. It shifts information, power, and responsibilities, in ways that are difficult to […]

Talking to the future

Yesterday, in a moment of distraction, I put the wrong password into my office smartcard three times, causing it to lock up. There are two ways of sorting that out. One is to go cap in hand to the IT support people, and wait while they do mysterious things on phone and screen, feeling mildly […]

Saturday, Sunday, Monday

  The oddest thing is not a gathering of almost 200 people choosing to spend a Saturday enthusiastically debating how they can use their deep collective knowledge of the workings of public services radically to improve them. That is startling enough, but it’s not the oddest thing. Considerably odder than that is that having spent […]

White elephants or white space?

Public sector organisations have a tendency to be elephantine. I suggested a few days ago that this was at least in part as a result of their size and age, rather than necessarily because being elephantine was limited to the public sector. In a comment on that post, Rik Barker challenged that view: I’ve been […]