DavePress

Bookmarks for February 3rd through February 8th

Dave — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:00:08 +0000

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

WordPress Mobile Pack « WordPress Plugins – "The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog."
A digital engagement framework adapted for local government by Michele Ide-Smith – "I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement."
Trackle.com – Find It. Track It. Share It. – Trackle looks a really good option as an online monitoring tool.
TeaCamp – A blog to help folk keep track of the regular government tea drinking meetups.
Why do councils still use Internet Explorer 6? | Learning Pool Blog – "the web has moved on substantially since then and, given that Microsoft has released two excellent versions of the browser since, I think its time for local government to turn its back on an outdated, insecure and slow browser."
Local knowledge is everything – BankerVision – "We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers. Well, we’re not."
Cloud Culture: any new threats? « Perfect Path – "My personal experience with Tuttle has been that the network is much stronger and more robust than we imagine. Whenever it get’s a push against it, it either repels invaders or morphs into something similar enough to still be Tuttle, but different enough to survive."
Innovation unlimited – Enterprise and Industry – European Commission – Interesting use of a blog from the EU's innovation unit.
So your council wants to blog? – "Having said that blogs are mundane, there are still not many examples of blogs written by local government officers (as opposed to councillors or community activists)."
Communicating Cohesion: Evaluating Local Authority Communication Strategies – "The report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation into local authority communications, from the perspective of promoting community cohesion. The findings reinforce the need for effective communications to address perceptions by some groups that they are losing out to others and the need for local authorities to take a strategic approach to communications that needs to involve not just the council staff and elected members, but the community itself."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

The public sector learning conference

Dave — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:10:48 +0000

Learning Pool’s public sector learning conference takes place on 12th May – the day after my birthday, fact fans – and is already looking like it will be an utterly awesome event.

Find out more and book your place – if you do it by the end of this week, you’ll get a ticket for 20% cheaper than everyone else!

Whether you are attending or not, make sure you sign up for the conference network, where you can connect and share experience and knowledge with the finest minds in public sector learning and collaboration.

Possibly related posts:

On leadership

Dave — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:51:48 +0000

Light blogging recently, mainly because I’ve been busy talking to people and haven’t had much spare time to write here. Apologies.

One of those talky things was at the Cllr 10 event, organised by the Local Government Innovation Unit, expertly led by Andy Sawford.

My session was somewhat pompously titled: Leadership 2.0: why local authorities need to become learning organisations. It was my usual hotch potch of ideas, snatched magpie-like from thinkers far more original than myself.

Big props go to Jemima Gibbons whose book, Monkeys with Typewriters informed a lot of what I said and is a very worthwhile read – as is her blog. David Wilcox has extensively covered Jemima’s work.

Here are my slides, for what they are worth:

Leadership 2.0

View more presentations from davebriggs.

Many thanks to Carl Haggerty for providing a screenshot from the internal business networking tool currently being piloted by Devon County Council.

Broadly speaking: the new online social technology changes the way we behave, and makes open, collaborative working methods much more likely to work. It’s also probably true that organisations need to be able to have proper grown up conversations internally before they can converse effectively with external people. New ways of working means new ways of leading, and in the local government context councillors can provide that leadership.

This is still half baked thinking on my part, and the bits that work are the bits I have stolen from others. But I’d welcome any feedback.

Possibly related posts:

GovCamp explained, kind of

Dave — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:38:45 +0000

Thanks to David Wilcox for being there with the camera!

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Bookmarks for January 26th through February 3rd

Dave — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:00:11 +0000

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

A Policy Dialogue Platform | Promoting Better Governance – "As part of the CIO Series 2009-10, Dave Mansfield answered questions on role of ICT in local government- the benefits, the challenges as well as what the future holds."
Repping the UK Scene | Huddle Up – Huddle.net’s Official Collaboration Blog – Interesting! "Our entry was an over-ambitious and unwieldy affair: we wanted to synchronise content between different instances of Sharepoint, each behind their own corporate firewall, using the collaboration features of Huddle to provide the heavy lifting and identity federation."
500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
Newspapers v councils « Tom Calver’s musings – "And behind the whole local paper argument though there seems to be a staggering arrogance. These owners and their journalists apparently believe that their papers have a right to exist that is independent of their readers. Even if nobody reads it, the very existence of the paper is a Good Thing."
eLearn: Best Practices – Tips for Effective Webinars – "Giving an effective webinar requires some presentation redesign and technology skills that you don't necessarily need in a face-to-face presentation. A great speaker in a face-to-face environment can easily crash and burn in a webinar setting if he or she isn't prepared for the unique challenges and needs of that environment."
SOCIAL MEDIA: Your EIGHT step guide to getting started… « The Dan Slee Blog – Dan Slee is a credit to Walsall Council. "Here’s some thoughts on how to go about turning your organisation into something fit for the 21st century."
Google Reader (1000+) – The event is about bringing local innovators together for a day to develop prototypes of online tools that tackle challenges about accessing local public sector services online – basically looking to make local residents’ lives easier through better online tools. And the things the event creates should be easily reused in other local areas throughout the UK.
Jailbrake – "Jailbrake is a competition to find and support great ideas that could break the cycle of youth offending using simple web and mobile tools."
Rocketbox – Powerful e-mail search for Apple Mail – "Rocketbox is a powerful, new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app. It's never been faster or easier to find what you need."
HipChat – Private chat for your company or team – "HipChat brings better-than-enterprise instant messaging to your organization. Get more done with chat rooms, file sharing, and searchable chat history. It’s a more productive and fun way to work."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Ideas, conversations and artists

Dave — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:09:55 +0000

As a follow up to my post on the UK .gov blogosphere, a small session was run at the recent govcamp on the state of blogging in the public sector in the UK.

The discussion was an interesting one and Al Reid took down some great notes that cover most of what was said. Pubstrat wrote a great post before the event which summed up most of the stuff we talked about anyway.

Here’s my take: I was wrong to mention blogs. A lot of the resultant discussion in the comments of that post and other chats have focused on blogging, which is of course just the medium. It’s the content I am interested in.

What we seem to lack is an ecosystem of ideas in public services. Discussions about new ways of doing things, how to change the way things are, how ideas get progressed into prototypes and then into actual delivered services or ways of working. Whether this happens on a blog, in a social network, on a wiki or over a cup of tea is neither here nor there.

This ties in with the discussion sparked by Dom on Twitter about the lack of challenge in evidence at the govcamp, and that it was a pretty homogenous group of people in attendance. The question was posed, how do we get everyone else to these events, or at least having these sorts of conversations?

I’ve no idea, frankly.

I believe a couple of things are pretty evident though:

Government at all levels has to improve its attitiude to ideas and thus to innovation
Structures and processes will help the behaviour required for an ideas ecosystem become embedded and accepted
People within organisations have to start getting better at talking to each other for any of this to actually work

The unconference format works very nicely in providing the space for people to have conversations about stuff. The blank canvas that is the agenda can be daunting, but with the right preparation, everyone can arrive at the event primed and ready to say things. I’m having chats with Jeremy and others about how this might be applied to individual organisations. Watch this space.

All of this ties in with what I started to think about in several post over the last couple of months, which seems to be coalescing in my mind around the notion of learning organisations – familiar to anyone that has read the work of Peter Senge but which for me focuses on the ability for organisations to have meaningful conversations, both internally and externally, and to have a grown up attitude to change and new ideas.

I’ll be talking about this on Thursday at the Cllr.10 event, with some focus on the shift in leadership that this stuff necessitates.

Also worth reading around these ideas is the work Lloyd Davis is doing, as social artist in residence at the Centre for Creative Collaboration. David Wilcox has covered social artistry before too. I’m not sure we’ll ever see civil servants or local government officers with that job title anytime soon, but the skills of convening and facilitation are vital for anyone who wants to succeed within a learning organisation.

The web is fundamental to the development of this thinking and the conversations around it. Firstly, because the web is the domain where the ideas are being kicked about and refined. Secondly, because these ideas are the by-products of using the web and social tools. As I keep saying these days, what makes social software interesting is not the software, but the implications of using it.

Possibly related posts:

Moronic reporting of non issues

Dave — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:57:18 +0000

Take a look at this story, excitingly titled on the BBC News site “Council Twitter users face rebuke“.

Councillors in Cornwall could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee for using social networking sites.

The trouble is, no they’re not.

Later in the article:

It follows claims that a number of councillors used Twitter during a meeting and mocked other members.

If a councillor is found to breach the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, they could be suspended.

So this is about councillors saying naughty things, and not about them using Twitter, or whatever.

Another example of the easy fixation on technology as being the story, when it isn’t. The story is behaviour: people and the relationships they have with others.

We really don’t need anymore Twitter scare stories, it isn’t productive and it helps nobody.

Possibly related posts:

Meeting with Microsoft

Dave — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:26:06 +0000

I had a very interesting hour today, chatting with James Brown and Dave Coplin at Microsoft. James works with the public sector all over the world, while Dave concentrates his effort on the UK. Dave also came along to last weekend’s govcamp – good man!

We had a great discussion about the state of public sector IT and the big issues, like open data, innovation and collaboration in government.

No one once claimed that Windows 7 was their idea.

I think it’s important that big vendors like Microsoft – and Google, IBM, SAP and others – are involved in these discussions. Here’s a few reasons why:

These guys know a lot of stuff, and they aren’t afraid to share it
Like it or not, a lot of public sector organisations buy their IT from bigco. If we – by which I mean the community of people interested in open and effective government – want real change to happen, these guys need to be involved in the conversations
Further, for long term technology enabled change to be sustainable within the huge – and not so huge – organisations that make up the public sector, the big boys have to be involved
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the issues we are all talking about are platform neutral. It’s in everyone’s interest that government becomes more innovative and collaborative, whether you are a civil servant, a one man govweb revolution, or a multinational supplier

Both James and Dave are keen to be a part of the conversation and the discussion around open government and the use of technology in organisations to drive improvement and efficiency. Dave even volunteered to write something for this blog in the near future – and now I’ve written it here, it looks like he’ll have to.

Possibly related posts:

Misplaced self belief

Dave — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:59:00 +0000

Great quote, from Chris Collison:

How often in an organisational situation do we get carried away with misplaced self-belief, a little (but not enough) knowledge, a little too much ego and an eager desire to just roll up our sleeves and get on with it – and create something that looks roughly right, but doesn’t withstand the test of time.

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More ukgc10 stuff

Dave — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:15:51 +0000

Thanks to Graham for putting together this Wordle produced from the text of all the tweets at Saturday’s govcamp. I like that ‘people’ is the second biggest word, and that ‘good’ is nicely central.

He has also made this spreadsheet available so you can follow all the tweets from the day – it’s like you’re there all over again. you’ll need access to Google Docs to be able to see it.

A quick reminder that content from the various sessions is being put together at http://ukgc.wikispaces.com/ – check to see if sessions you ran or attended have notes – if not, add them!

Where next with all this? Anthony at the Democratic Society has some ideas.

Update: great post from Pubstrat.