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 – that [...]
Posts under ‘Public administration’
Civil service social media use during election ‘purdah’
‘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 funding [...]
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 journalists [...]
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 malign [...]
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 worth [...]
Beta legislation: Changing the concept of ‘leadership’?da
The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’.
It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, we [...]
A few words on governance
Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.
It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny [...]
Democratic, decentralised and difficult
I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services.
The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
