I’ve been an interested follower of the debate around town centres since the Portas review of last year, not least because I live close by to a small town, and indeed it’s one where a debate is raging about the future and sustainability of the town centre as a place for people to visit, andRead… Read more »
WordPress, the open source content management system that I use here on this blog, is growing in its utilisation across government. It took root a bit quicker in central government, with the Number 10 site, Defra, Wales Office and the Department of Health, amongst others, using WordPress to deliver some or all of their webRead… Read more »
For the last couple of months I’ve been playing around with a Lenovo Ideapad S205. It’s a slightly bigger than a netbook machine that runs Windows 7. I’ve been a pretty dedicated Mac user for the last five years or so, but have been tempted to switch back to Windows for a couple of reasons.Read… Read more »
Now and again I find time to read books about work-related stuff. Here are three I have been tucking into recently. John Naughton is a hero of mine. His weekly column in The Observer is required reading, and A Brief History of the Future is a wonderful primer on the origins of the internet. HisRead… Read more »
Here’s my latest wheeze: an entirely online conference to discuss digital government stuff. It’ll be free too. Here’s how things will run. There will be two sessions per day, three days a week over 2 weeks – so 12 in total. Right now I am thinking this will be between 7th and 18th May. TopicsRead… Read more »
One bit of work we’ve been doing a fair bit of at Kind of Digital is putting events on the web. One example is the seminar that took place in Leeds yesterday, run by Local Government Yorkshire and Humber. The idea is that these public service type events are all about getting the message toRead… Read more »
The group blog collecting people’s thoughts is really good reading. Lloyd hits the nail on the head here: We do it this way because it works and because we’ve seen the alternative really fail big time again and again. Because it’s unusual for most of us and outside of our everyday experience, it’s tempting toRead… Read more »
I had an exhausting time at GovCamp this weekend. We had lots of people. There were lots of discussions. There was much tweeting. Many photos were taken. Lots of blogging has happened. Dan Slee had the fab idea of just posting 20 quick thoughts and take-aways. So let’s have a (somewhat delayed) go. I don’tRead… Read more »
Just before Christmas, I received the very excellent news that I have been taken up on my offer to become a trustee of Community Lincs, a local community development charity here in Lincolnshire. I’m delighted, because it’s going to give me a chance to do my bit supporting the great work the organisation does inRead… Read more »
I wrote a thing for the Guardian’s Public Leaders’ Network: The explosion in online innovation throughout public services is seeing more and more activity taking place on the net, whether via interactive websites, or mobile applications. Networks such as Twitter and Facebook provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and problem solving on a scale unimaginable previouslyRead… Read more »