Interesting elsewhere – 12 February 2014

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

The policy world and academia offer widely different opportunities for early career researchers. | Impact of Social Sciences
In academia you look for a problem you can answer well, and in policy you find the best answer you can to the problem you are given.

Striking a balance between security and usability | Government Digital Service
All too often, it’s been the case that people have approached security as something that either people who deal with compliance and writing documents deal with, or that the techies deal with. It’s a fundamental part of the service; it’s not this separate thing that one team thinks about.

Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices: 1. The Office Is Not Dead | spaceandorganisation
So what exactly is it that the office adds to our working lives, or in other words, what are the affordances of space? Grounded in my research, I would argue that space is important since it affords 1) co-presence, 2) encounter and 3) routines.

There is no UX, there is only UX | disambiguity
The truth is that, for many of our projects, the truly challenging user experience issues come not from designing the interface*, but from the constraints of the product that must be designed. Those constraints and challenges tend to come from our friends in policy or standards, or procurement or other parts of the organisation. Try as you might, you can’t interface away inappropriate policy.

The Four Freedoms | Matt Mullenweg
I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales | Business Bullshit, Corporate Crap and other stuff from the World of Work
A well-managed hierarchy is among the most effective weapons for getting rid of the friction, incompetence, and politics that plague bad organisations.

We need to start talking about public service reform again : RSA blogs
Instead of focussing solely on supply side reform and choice and competition, we need to understand how better to manage demand. This is about households, families and communities – what they want for their lives, what they expect from public services and what they can do for themselves. Unless public services start to engage with and try to change the dynamics of demand then they will face a bleak future as residualised services.

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