This is the video I shot (with hand-held Flash camera, someone tweeted about how I managed to keep my hand up for an hour) of one of Twitter’s creators, Blaine Cooke, visiting Teacamp, a gathering of Whitehall (London) webbies and hangers on. Cooke kindly spent a hour answering questions about Twitter – where it cameRead… Read more »
The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »
Image via Wikipedia eGovernment Register reports today on ‘social media’ use in local councils (LAs), noting that work by Liz Azyan published on her blog at LGEOResearch.com shows it at: Number % of LAs Facebook 48 11% Twitter 128 30% YouTube 63 15% RSS 122 28% Web dev blogs/feeds 6 1% Now I would argueRead… Read more »
Twitpic Ross L Grant Google UK launched it’s local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people. As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me. IRead… Read more »
It’s my understanding that next general election must be held by the first week of next June, and might be called sooner. This is a terrific opportunity to observe the voters, parties and government of a highly educated, bandwidth-rich nation as they engage with social media under election pressure. I won’t pretend to provide anythingRead… Read more »
Originally published at the GenerationShift blog. Per this post from Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the UK central government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), below is a “Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments.” It’s a helpful document as it includes a very brief overview of Twitter, offers some objectives andRead… Read more »
This is a reposting of a piece I wrote for NESTA’s Social by Social report with both my FutureGov and Enabled by Design hats on, launched at the recent Reboot Britain event. I co-founded Enabled by design with Denise Stephens back in April 2008 following the first Social Innovation Camp with the intention of challengingRead… Read more »
Image by Getty Images via Daylife The gongs have been handed out for the Queen’s Birthday and, scanning through, I couldn’t see one for a webbie or a tekkie. This seemed particularly odd looking at the ones locally for Cambridge – home of the ‘Silicon Fen‘ – and the business related ones didn’t include anyRead… Read more »
Following the enormously successful second BarcampUKGovweb, held at the Ministry of Justice in January, digital enabler Dave Briggs got to organising our first localgovcamp. LocalGovCamp is an event for local government folk that will take place on Saturday 20 June at the Fazeley Studios in Birmingham. This blog is the main source of information aboutRead… Read more »
A couple of weeks ago I made the argument on my personal blog’Why .gov webbies need professional status‘. This is not a new idea, it’s been circulating in the UK for a couple of years. Problem is it hasn’t actually gone anywhere. Now the idea has some solidity through the efforts of myself and theRead… Read more »