Necessity, that is. It’s Budget Day and the cuts are in the post. My incredible predictive powers tell me that government spending may be under a bit of pressure shortly. If you’re not a regular over at William Heath’s Ideal Government blog, this post is a good introduction to his general themes. In his overview [...]
Posts under ‘Public administration’
Conservative local government proposals
The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut. It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today. Shift Delete Command backspace SysRq F12 Home PgDn Escape [...]
Civil servants guidelines update
I’m a bit slow with this one, but just to close a loop that was opened a few weeks ago here, those Civil Service Social Media Guidelines are now public. Over at Puffbox, Simon seems slightly pleasantly surprised: “But whilst there’s a requirement to limit ‘civil servants’ participation in a professional capacity in social networks’, I don’t necessarily read [...]
Civil service social media use during election ‘purdah’
Later this week, a document will be published outlining what civil servants can and can’t do with social media during the election ‘purdah’ period. I’ve been given an outline of what guidance it includes and I’m here to tell you now that – when you see it, I think you will agree with me – [...]
‘Empowerment’
For me, this post by Kevin Harris sums up what happened over the past decade, where new Labour’s lightly held good intentions met their managerialst bent and the two cancelled each other out: “Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of [...]
Three signposts off
I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else. Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy [...]
How to increase the ‘chatter’ level on a policy area you care about
If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE). I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now [...]
A way of involving the ‘hard-to-reach’ groups and the expense of the ‘hard-to-avoids’
Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the [...]
Listening with a purpose
Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago: “…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a [...]
How bloggers can help people understand public service
One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing. Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
