Posts By Steph Gray

Dealing with social media mishaps

When you tweet something about work that you shouldn’t have, or from the wrong account and it gets picked up, you want the ground to swallow you up. It’s awful, and the chronicles of social media crises are full of heads on pikestaffs. But what feels like a full-on social media crisis at the time,Read… Read more »

Engagement on a shoestring

You could probably do more digital engagement around a series of stakeholder seminars, but it would be a tall order. For the last month or so, DCMS have been running a little site we helped build for them on our Read+Comment platform, to open up discussion around a series of seminars they’re running to informRead… Read more »

Taking email seriously

I’ve just written a wrap-up post over on the Mailcamp site about Thursday’s Mailcamp12 event at the NAO, which saw over 80 people discuss email marketing, newsletters and alerts with similarly smart folk from across and beyond the public sector. As I say there: For me, it felt like the conversation had moved on aRead… Read more »

Getting community conversations going

Over the last year, one of the toughest but most rewarding areas of work I’ve been doing is training, mainly with central government communications staff, and often through the Government Communications Network. Our team of Simon Booth-Lucking, Dave Briggs and Giles Field, with occasional invited guests such as Dan Slee or Tim Lloyd, run soup-to-nutsRead… Read more »

Feet on the ground

There’s been a lot of buzz about the G-Cloud today and over the weekend, and rightly so. It’s a potentially exciting development, and a real achievement for Chris Chant and his team. Not only have they set out, aggressively in Civil Service terms, to get a better deal for taxpayers, but they’ve also managed theRead… Read more »

The year of living helpfully

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/5381950736/)” src=”http://www.helpfultechnology.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/sg-at-govcamp-550×396.png” alt=”Me at govcamp (Photo: Paul Clarke – http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/5381950736/)” width=”550″ height=”396″ /> It’s been 18 months since I last walked the mean streets of Westminster as a civil servant. There are things I miss about the old lifestyle: having the scope to run with projects on the ‘inside’, being in the loop on theRead… Read more »

Taking government APIs seriously

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a Monday afternoon at a stakeholder event hosted by the Cabinet Office’s Transparency team on their Making Open Data Real consultation, with an interesting crowd of developers and users of public data products. We spent three hours pondering our thoughts on how greater use of open data mightRead… Read more »

A very British election

Just a quick post to flag a little site launched last month for a modest and little-known public figure, reported to be the first Briton to give £1bn to charitable causes, and the third longest-serving minister of the New Labour years. Lord Sainsbury of Turville was nominated earlier this year to succeed Prince Phillip asRead… Read more »