My Police

Or MyPolice. Or mypolice.org. Or mypolice.org.uk. Or OnePlace. Or TotalPlace. Or governmentonceagainallovertheeffingplace.org.uk. You may have read about the ‘confusion’ caused when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary crashed like an elephant from a great height on the small social innovation project…

Contributory negligence

I am not giving to writing political posts. Indeed, the allegiances of the characters in this one are unimportant compared to the message they give about society, participation and responsibility. This line was the trigger: “This decision will cost him…

A Glossary

This glossary of social media and digital engagement terms comes from a recent piece of my strategy work. It’s skewed towards the government sector, in terms of language and examples. Feel free to use any of this that might be…

On risk

On Monday 22 February I attended the Post-Bureaucratic Age event. Some very interesting content, and a highly eclectic audience. One detail from one of the presentations has been nagging away at me though. Professor Mark McGurk of Guy’s & St…

iCharity: an obvious idea

At breakfast this morning, Dan Harrison came out with a deceptively simple question: “Why isn’t there an easy way to give to charity using apps and iTunes?” We pondered it. I tweeted the question. General response: the model wouldn’t work;…

Observe – feedback – fix

Congratulations Camden Council. I’m in the process of fighting a case on behalf of #tweetbike about a little parking matter. That’s another story. But at two stages in the appeal process so far I’ve been pointed to the online appeal…

Central or decentral?

Yes, nice easy question. Should be a short post. One of the debates that stuck in my mind at the UK GovCamp 10 came from a session hosted by Alastair Smith. Ostensibly about the ‘UK snow’* and what that had…

Feelings, form and function

I was wrapped up in the UK Government Barcamp on Saturday (and the prospect of having to smuggle my SLR past the Googleguards twice more than I had to filled me with no joy) so I didn’t get to the…

Hardwired State

It’s easy to see why projects fail. Why ‘open goals’ are so often missed trying to improve public services with new technologies. Or is it? What’s been happening in recent months? Rewired State: generated 30+ ideas in one day for…

How bad are things really?

One interesting way to understand more about problems in systems is to find something absurd, and analyse it. So here’s something absurd. It’s nearing the end of January. Tax return time for many. We know where to go, of course:…

The Bridge and The Ferry

So there’s this river. Big, deep, wide. Cliffs on either side and a tricky path down from them. Stuff needs to get across it. It really needs a bridge. But that would involve major engineering on both sides, and the…

Welcoming data.gov.uk

I’ll be at the launch of data.gov.uk this afternoon, and like many who’ll read this, have had a close interest – rather than direct involvement – in its genesis over the last year or so. What is it? Simply put,…