DavePress

What I’ve been reading

Dave — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:00:08 +0000

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

BDU: Big Data – E-learning about "big data" which people keep telling me is going to be important.
WP2Cloud – Interesting one for WordPress dorks (like me). Stores all your WP site stuff in Amazon's cloud.
Announcing Open Space South West #OpenSSW – Sounds like it will be a fun event – well done Carl Haggerty!
Sir Bob Kerslake: why social media is a vital tool for the civil service – …and not just the civil service of course. Nice to see positive noises from the top
Antibodies, Attack Dogs, and Success Cats: 3 New Product Lessons – Even innovating in innovation organisations isn't easy.
Acting on the annual user survey | Stephen Hale – Great open discussion about website user happiness.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What does a councillor’s website need?

Dave — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:55:38 +0000

Not one of my more informative posts, this one, more a cry for help.

I’ve been approached by a couple of councillors to develop a website for them, and I’m interested to know what sort of features would be required for such a site to be considered best of breed.

For example:

Blog style layout
Events/meeting listings
Local maps
Easy methods of contact
Feedback through comments, etc

None of these seem particularly exciting to me! Anyone got anything really good that ought to be included – or great examples of Councillor websites?

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LocalGovCamp 2012

Dave — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:31:37 +0000

LocalGovCamp is returning!

It will be held on Saturday, July 14th in Birmingham – venue to be confirmed.

Thanks to the UKGovCamp fund and Talk About Local who are early sponsors. If you want to throw some cash at a seriously cool bunch of local government innovators, you know where I am.

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What I’ve been reading

Dave — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:00:07 +0000

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

DIY.mySociety.org | Do It Yourself mySociety – a resource for anyone who wants to build copies of mySociety sites, anywhere in the World – MySociety make it easy to reuse their code.
Welcome – The Data Journalism Handbook – This looks like it is a terrific resource – and not just for journalists.
Audit of Political Engagement 9, Part One – Archived Press Releases – "New Hansard Society research shows people turning away from national politics"
Open data: magic from the inside out? – bm.wel.by – "Recently things have started to change in a way that has got me thinking that perhaps the magic of open data is found from the inside out."
Sphereless: Dissecting the still-breathing body of "Open Data" – "So why do we use the term "Open"?"

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Two cool tools for knowledge and learning

Dave — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:08:27 +0000

Neat applications for sharing knowledge and learning are like buses, it turns out.

Icon is a new app from Spigit, who are the leaders in innovation management software. It’s a really simple concept (which is good) – the online question and answer format, but for an internal audience.

So, what Yammer is to Twitter, Icon is to Quora.

It’s a fab idea and to be quite honest I have no idea why nobody has done it before.

Icon is free to get going with, and could be an incredibly easy way to build up a useful internal knowledge base. For those using Yammer already, there seems to be a way to integrate them, which is a good idea.

Lore is an online course platform. Unlike than big systems like Moodle, it focuses on making it really easy to make single courses, and to just get them out there.

It provides a place for discussions to take place between learners and teachers, accept and grade assignments, share resources, and to have a calendar for real life get togethers and webinars.

What’s remarkable is that it is free!

I’m going to be having a play with Lore to see how well it works, and perhaps put together a test online course about digital engagement, if folk would be up for it.

Thanks to Rich Millington for bringing Lore to my attention. Rich and his colleagues are running a free course about online community management using the Lore platform, which will be well worth signing up for!

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Going hyperlocal

Dave — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:42:53 +0000

I had an enjoyable time on Saturday at the Talk About Local unconference, where lots of people involved in hyperlocal websites get together to share stories and experiences and to figure out answers to tricky questions.

There tends to be two angles with hyperlocal – the future of local journalism stuff which I tend to find rather dull; and then the community activist side, which is a bit more interesting.

I enjoyed the session organised by Vicky Sargent on neighbourhood planning and hyperlocals. We’re supporting a local neighbourhood plan initiative with web stuff – see A Plan for Holbeach – and of course there is our site for NALC too.

Vicky has a web tool coming out soon to support local groups in putting together neighbourhood plans – which ought to be pretty useful and I’m looking forward to seeing more on that.

Philip John – a Kind of Digital team member – ran a session proposing the Hyperlocal Alliance, which sounds like a great initiative and you can find out more about that here.

I didn’t run any sessions – I’m not really a hyperlocalist myself and was mainly in listening mode – but I have kicked off a project to openly collaborate on a hyperlocal handbook. Do join in!

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Tools for writing

Dave — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:26:26 +0000

I use a ridiculous number of apps for writing stuff down digitally. It all depends on the context!

Rough notes, ideas and that sort of thing tend to be stored in Evernote. It’s easy, and ubiquitous and everything gets kept in one place.

Blog posts are written in MarsEdit, an offline editor. My local drafts folder is full of half-written, half-baked posts which occasionally get resurrected later on.

Any coding I have to do usually happens in BBEdit, or occasionally something like Nano in a terminal window.

Proposals and other documents which I’m the only person likely to ever edit are done in Pages, and then exported to PDF for distribution. I just like the way Pages works in terms of laying things out and so on.

Documents and reports that I need to share in an editable format with colleagues or customers have to be written in Word. Since upgrading to the 2011 version on the Mac I have found myself getting angry much less!

Longer documents, such as various guides and handbooks I am working on tend to be planned using an outliner tool. My favourite at the moment is OmniOutliner.

I sometimes use a mind mapping tool to plan a document though, which is a bit more visual. My favourite mind mapping app is MindNode.

(As well as for documents, an outliner or mind mapper is really useful for planning presentations.)

For the actual writing of bigger documents, I use Scrivener. This lets you break down the document into smaller bits, which can then be dragged around and re-ordered. Scrivener then sticks it all together into one document for you when you’re ready to publish. It’s great!

Whether using OmniOutliner or MindNode, I can import my outlines into Scrivener by exporting them to an OPML file, which then loads into Scrivener, giving me all the headings under which I need to bash text.

One type of editor that I don’t find myself using are the stripped down, distraction free apps like Writeroom or Byword.

What apps do you use for writing?

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Planning for Councillors

Dave — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:14:49 +0000

A nice little project this, that we developed for our friends at NALC. It’s a site introducing some of the issues around planning, particularly aimed at parish councillors.

We did the design and built the WordPress template, while the guys at NALC provided the content for us to build the pages.

The purpose of the site is really to drive traffic to NALC’s e-learning platform (provided by my good chums at Learning Pool) as well as to other online learning resources about planning.

We wanted the site to have a nice and bright, informal feel that perhaps not many websites in this particular sector tend to feature, and are pretty pleased with the results!

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What I’ve been reading

Dave — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:00:28 +0000

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

SOCIAL PLAN: 11 Golden Rules for Social Media in an Organisation – Some nice tips from Dan.
OGP Take Aways : Tim’s Blog – "In an attempt to use reflective blogging to capture thoughts from the Open Government Partnership meeting in Brasilia I’ve jotted down ten key learning points, take-aways, or areas I’ve been musing on. "
Will Apps Kill Websites? – Pros and cons of apps v websites
Neighborland – Interesting hyperlocal effort in the States.
Is the deluge of data good for government? | LGiU’s local democracy blog – "Over the past couple of weeks, however, a series of news reports have underlined the growing importance of open data to the mainstream contemporary political conversation but have also revealed some ambiguities in our attitude towards it. "

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

The Digital Engagement Cookbook

Dave — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:04:05 +0000

Had a silly-busy week this week so only just now getting the chance to blog this.

On Tuesday we launched the Digital Engagement Cookbook – an online database of online engagement methods.

Kind of Digital were paid and supported by Consumer Focus to create the database, and I brought in some help. Fraser Henderson from Particitech and a regular Kind of Digital collaborator provided ideas and content whilst Stuart Harrison did the tech.

It’s a great example of the results that can be produced by working flexibly and in a collaborative fashion.

The idea behind the site is that it gives you ideas on how you might go about engaging online, depending on certain parameters that you feed the database.

So, are you targeting a certain demographic group? Are you at a certain point in the policy process? How much money have you got?

The Cookbook then produces a list of potential methods for you to use, rated in terms of how closely they match your criteria.

It’s pretty useful as it is now, but we’re looking at ways of improving it, such as allowing people to contribute new methods, or provide case studies of how certain methods have worked out in the field.

Anyway, the Cookbook is free to use, and I would be glad to have any feedback on it.