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Place Based Social Innovation

On Wednesday 4th May 2011 @Coprodnet asked: What would a place-based social innovation infrastructure (people-relationships, places, processes tech) look like? For what they are worth these are my thoughts…..

Shropcamp Report

I am hoping that this will become a vibrant community of interest which will drive the use of open data and social media in helping to engage and empower communities in rural areas such as Shropshire so that next year’s Shropcamp will be bigger yet and who knows, it may take on a wider rural participation.

Digital Inclusion & Public Value – Have the States Got IT?

Broadband Infrastructure must be one of the few public procurements where form does not follow function. Form rules in terms of technology, there are wireless champions, cable champions, and fibre champions yet nobody seems to be sitting down to consider exactly what it is we want to deliver. If speed were a commodity then everything would be fine, everybody agrees that they want speedy communications but given that we are embarked upon a significant public spend ought we to not at least debate what we are looking for in our communities?

Cesi n'est pas une pipe

The National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010 (NDI 10) was a better conference than last year. This was in part due to the involvement of larger numbers of individuals and groups that are engaged in delivery and in part due to the organisation of the event which was much more open than last year. Martha Lane [...]

Silver Bullets

Silver bullets have a place in the popular consciousness; a silver bullet used to despatch the bad guys for the Lone Ranger, silver bullets are also useful if you need to dispense with a werewolf and silver bullets probably make great jewellery. In “Systems Thinking, Systems Practise” Peter Checkland revisits the idea of Weltanschauung or world [...]

Who are the Neteratti?

One of the things that people tend to ignore is that government organisations are not designed to be transformational. They are designed to be process oriented, reliable, auditable and while they serve all of us they are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable people in our society. With that as your key driver you don’t suddenly start transforming things just because a load of middle class Neteratti start shouting about it. The implication of this is that the core functions of local government will not change quickly or significantly over a short timescale. What will happen is that certain functions will move outside of government, and we see this happening already, and it will move into the realm of the Neteratti.

Media Literacy

Have you ever been to one of those workshops which begin with the words “I want you to tell us something about yourself that nobody else in the room would know” I‘m not going to have a grumpy old man moment about my views on this but I will confess to something that not a [...]

Citizen Shock

Two things have prompted me to commit these thoughts to print: the idea that Social Media is nothing more than an enabler for Gov 20 – a comment doing the rounds of #Gov20 last week – and the idea that people have disengaged from politics and need to be somehow re-connected.