These are my links for July 19th through July 28th:
- TweetPo.st | Tweet in your Face! – TweetPo.st is designed for those who want to use Twitter as their primary status update tool without spamming all of their Facebook friends with tweets that don’t make any sense to them.
- E-government 2.0 – McKinsey Quarterly – Public Sector – Management – Despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online. By employing new governance models, investing in Web capabilities, and embracing user participation, agencies can raise the effectiveness of their online presence.
- TwitchBoard – TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service. We’re working on connections to many other services
- Steve Dale – GeoChirp – Twitter Application – GeoChirp helps you search for people Twittering for specific things in a specific area.
- A councillor’s guide to social media Home – A councillor’s guide to social media – The purpose of this wiki is building some concise guidance on how councils and councillors can use social media to improve services and connect with citizens. It will be published in short hard-copy format and a more expansive and linked web resource
- Mash the State :: Getting government data to the people – A grassroots campaign to encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public using RSS/Atom feeds.
It’s insecure, it’s flaky… it’s government IT policy!
I picked up on this article in The Register a couple of days ago, where Tom Watson MP had asked UK government departments when they intended to upgrade their browsers from Internet Explorer (IE6). It didn’t really surprise me that Tom Watson had raised this issue since I know he’s an advocate for modernising government through better use of technology, he’s a prolific blogger in his own right http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/ and was the primary driver in setting up the Power of Information Taskforce.
Tom Watson told the Reg:
“I’ve asked the questions because I feel sorry for the thousands of civil servants using the Austin Allegro of web browsers when they can have newer, faster alternatives. I want government CIOs to pull their fingers out.”
You can read the full article for yourselves, but I’ve abstracted the key points below:
- The Department of Justice and Foreign Office are in the process of upgrading
- The Department of Culture, Media and Sport expects to complete its move to IE7 by the end of August 2009.
- The Home Office quoted February 2010
- The Department of Health has no plans to upgrade
- The MOD currently has no plans to upgrade.
A pretty mixed bag then and pretty depressing reading on behalf of couple of departments. It also occurred to me why there isn’t an overarching strategy for web browsers across government. After all, isn’t this a key and fundamental component for doing ANY work on the intranet or the internet? And aren’t most staff in these departments dependent on being on-line as part of their daily routines?
I’d like to see this same question being asked of local government, where I suspect a similar pattern of complacency will emerge. In a strange paradox, government (central and local) put a high premium on security and accessibility for any new web services or technology procurement, but once vendors have jumped through all the appropriate hoops, a coach and horses can be driven through the whole process by insisting that the product or service will work with IE6 browsers. This places a huge burden on vendors who must ensure all features are backwards compatible with a browser that doesn’t comply with W3C standards and is full of security holes.
I know for a fact (given I am the business lead for the product) that a significant part of the development budget for the local government community of practice platform goes into ensuring that all the features work with IE6. I estimate that at least 20% savings could be made if backward compatibility extended only as far as IE7 – which does at least comply with most of the W3C standards.
The latest information on IE6 market share is just over 12%. I’m betting that a good proportion of this 12% is public sector workers who continue to be poorly served by their IT departments and CIOs who don’t see the browser as being an important component in improving user productivity.
I’d like to see a campaign similar to the one started by Mash the State (Twitter: http://twitter.com/mashthestate) which aims to get more councils to use RSS feeds, but this time to get central and local government to kick the IE6 habit – and quickly. My preference would be to give some choice to users on the browsers they use (I use Firefox because of the huge number of productivity plug-ins I can use), but I suspect this may be too ambitious. Let’s at least provide civil servants with a standards compatible browser that is more secure than IE6, offers some productivity enhancements and requires less development effort to make it work with standards-compliant web services.
Anyone up for getting a campaign started?
These are my links for July 14th through July 18th:
- Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines – Managing staff who participate in social networks.
This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on. I’ve done a few press (radio, print) interviews this week re: Telstra so I thought I should have another look at how Enterprise, Government, Corporates, Not for Profits are handling the fact that their staff are members of social networks too.
- WiserEarth: Connecting You to Communities of Action – WiserEarth is an online community space connecting the people, nonprofits and businesses working toward a just and sustainable world
- Gov 2.0: Where to begin – Part 3 of 3 « what are we doing today, brain? – There are some passionate individuals and communities in this space, and empowering one or a few internal champions to engage will be enormously beneficial through what is learned and then able to be integrated into your strategy. Below are a few communities I know of:
Twitter – check out the #publicsphere, #gov2au and #gov20 hashtags (discussions), and connect with people who are participating in the discussion. This will rapidly get you in touch with many local experts, as well as in tune with what the Twitter community interested in this space are saying. Conferences – look for and attend Gov 2.0, Web 2.0 and Open Government events.
Gov 2.0 groups/lists – there are several useful ones. A few I’ve joined include the Gov 2.0 Australia mailing list, GovLoop networking group, the Gov 2.0 Ning group, and of course it is worth subscribing to and participating in the Government 2.0 Taskforce blog.
- Gov 2.0: Where to begin – Part 2 of 3 « what are we doing today, brain? – In the United Kingdom there has been a lot of work done to look at “Gov 2.0” by the “Power of Information Taskforce”, which was established in 2008 based on a report completed in 2007 by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg called the ‘Power of Information review‘. The core aspects of the Taskforce recommendations include: helping people online where they seek help; innovate and co-create with citizens online; open up the policy dialogue online; reform geospatial data; modernise data publishing and reuse; and a modern capability.
- Gov 2.0: Where to begin – Part 1 of 3 « what are we doing today, brain? – have tried to put together some very practical first steps for government representatives and agencies who are struggling to understand this space. The first step is to gather information. Above is hopefully some useful working definitions that will help, but you should also read the draft briefing paper from Senator Lundy’s Public Sphere event on Government 2.0, which is the collation of several hundred perspectives and ideas in this space. All the videos, Twitter chatter and blog comments are linked there too.
These are my links for July 5th through July 11th:
- Defining the roles within digital engagement – One of the big challenges for the emerging field of digital engagement is to define and describe what it is that we do, and establish roles within teams which can enable it to happen more easily, more consistently and on a larger scale.
- 5 Essential Traits for Community Managers – Community manager is the new it position in social media. To establish hardcore communities of evangelists around your brand, you need to have one. However, what makes up a successful community manager? Every community manager must have their own style and idea about how to run things for their company, right?
Some basic tenets and rules apply regardless of the company, here narrowed it down to 5 essential traits.
- Help Create The Charter in Mixed Ink – Drafting a statment which local authorities, national government and voluntary agencies can sign up to as a comittment to change
- SOCIAL BY SOCIAL – New Book, launched 6th July 2009 at #rebootbritain
New technologies are changing the way we engage communities, run companies, deliver public services, participate in government and campaign for change. These new technologies are available to all of us. And they offer us an amazing opportunity to change our world.
- 30 Twitter Tools For Managing Followers | Tools | PelFusion.com – To manage your followers or friends on twitter is not an easy task. To be successful on twitter you have to analyze different things. You should know how active your followers are, do they retweet your tweets, do they update regularly and you should know those whom you are following are following you.
To manage all above things there are some helpful web based applications. Good news is you don’t have to search for them i have already compiled 30 twitter tools for you to manage followers.
- Putting Government Data online – Design Issues – This, 2009, is the year for putting government data online. Both US and UK governments made public commitments toward open data. The TED talk on Linked Data was in February. Groups from the Guardian to the Sunlight Foundation had already been pushing for it for a long time. People like Watchdog.net, mysociety.org, and govtrack.us had been pushing by publishing government data themselves in various formats, including Linked Data.
So if you want to do this, what should you do? This article addresses this question very briefly, and makes a set of points which will probably be outdated by later developments, but answer a set of relevant question, asked or not.
All UK Mobile Numbers Become Accessible Next Week
A Directory of Mobile Phone numbers goes live early next week. All numbers including those belonging to children will be open to unsolicited messages or calls.
It is easy to unsubscribe, but it must be done before the beginning of next week to ensure you are ex directory.
To remove your number click on this link.
You will need to have your mobile phone with you as the unsubscribe code will be sent to you via text.
Please suggest it to your friends, family or those with children who have UK mobiles.
These are my links for June 17th through July 3rd:
- The Problem and the Fix for the US Intelligence Agencies' Lessons Learned – This post is about a recent study I conducted for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to look at the Lessons Learned problems across the Intelligence Community (IC) and within DIA specifically. Although the study was conducted within an industry that has been publicly taken to task for its inability to learn from its own experience (The 9/11 Commission Report and the Commission on WMD in Iraq) the challenges these agencies face are not unlike those many other government agencies and corporations have to confront.
In this study I examine some of the causes of those difficulties and make recommendations about how the IC might make better use of what they learn from their own experience. With DIA’s permission I have excerpted both the challenges and some of the recommendations from the larger study.
- The nonsense of 'knowledge management' – Examines critically the origins and basis of 'knowledge management', its components and its development as a field of consultancy practice. Problems in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'information' are explored, as well as Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing'. The concept is examined in the journal literature, the Web sites of consultancy companies, and in the presentation of business schools. The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing.
- Metacrap – Metadata is "data about data" — information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard — a Document Type Definition or scheme — for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
- Column 2 : Transition strategies for Enterprise 2.0 adoption #e2conf – Lee Bryant of Headshift looked at the adoption challenges for Enterprise 2.0 technologies in companies that have grown up around a centralized model of IT, particularly for the second wave adopters required to move Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream within an organization. He points out that we can’t afford the high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.
External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it’s a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren’t putting up with that: they’re going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.
- Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List on Statsaholic.com – There are literally thousands of "web 2.0" companies, and until now, there's been no easy way to compare which ones are getting traffic. The list of 952 sites below was inspired by the list started by Bob Stumpel and then added to by many others