There’s an old adage that an unhappy customer will tell ten people about the bad service they have received. If that was ever true, it is startling how quickly and comprehensively it is untrue now. Here’s a little story unfolding in front of our eyes. The starting point is Helen Lippell being on the receivingRead… Read more »

The most prominent predictors of the future tend to be the most wrong Geoff Mulgan Original post

I am a menshevik. Steph Gray is a bolshevik. It may not end well. Steph wants a revolution, and he wants it by next summer. He does not believe in the false consciousness of the bourgeois revolution and is wary of alliances with objective supporters of the current regime. Despite the immaturity of the proletariat,Read… Read more »

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it. Alan Cooper, quoted by Edward Tufte Original post

One of the things I like about gov.uk is that if you spot a little glitch and ask them to fix it, they probably will. Even better, they make it easy to do that by having a feedback link on every page, thus encouraging behaviour which is to the benefit of all. Another thing IRead… Read more »

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web Building Capabilities: Wither the Department? | Institute for Government While the money continues to flow along firmly departmental lines, with little political appetite to pool either budgets or accountability at scale, most civil servants will continue to see their professional incentives tied to recognition within theirRead… Read more »

Writing is a form of processing my ideas. Dave Winer Original post

Law matters. It matters at a detailed level because we all need to understand rights, duties, obligations and constraints. It matters at a social level because it is the framework for mutually accepted constraint which is part of what defines civilised society. The purpose and foundations of law are lofty and quite abstract. The immediateRead… Read more »

There is a lot of pseudo-scientific claptrap published about the future. There are people who carefully extrapolate trends, construct complex scenarios, weight many outcomes, some of whom necessarily get some things right through sheer chance, but many of whom appear to rely on nobody checking back from the future to see how well they did.Read… Read more »

She thinks she is leading the way, but actually she’s just going in front. Overheard, context unknown Original post