Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

• Tools for ideation and problem solving: Part 1
• 21st Century public service – is it a thing? « @Podnosh
• Autodesk 123D Design – free 3D printing design software
• Data, information, knowledge and power – exploring Open Knowledge’s new core purpose – from @timdavies
• All Things IC | How to write an internal communication strategy
• Code Red_: the rescue of healthcare.gov by a small team of volunteer techies
• A Brief Guide To Selecting A Community Platform
• Mixing the unconference format into a traditional conference – @lloyddavis
• Pico: No more passwords!
• Dancing Giants: Can big companies still innovate? | PandoDaily

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

• ongoing by Tim Bray · Software in 2014
• Joho the Blog » What blogging was – *sniff*
• Is Local GDS a good idea? « @demsoc
• Let’s Replace Council Websites with Local.Gov.Uk – a GDS for Local Government – @copley_rich
• Joined Up Philanthropy data standards: seeking simplicity, and depth – @timdavies
• Can we fix democracy? #ukvotecamp | Sharon O’Dea
• [toread] How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet
• [toread] Broadcast Education: a Response to Coursera – Hybrid Pedagogy
• Virtual Community Summit – great looking community management conference / via @fevebee
• The Intrinsic Value of Blogging | Matt Mullenweg

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

• David Wilcox » As the Knowledge Hub faces closure, might a creative Twitter mob help with re-invention?
• the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist
• Make and share useful lists | Gini
• Google Reader alternatives | Gini
• Some things I’ve learnt about public speaking | John Graham-Cumming
• Evan Williams on Building a Mindful Company | Holacracy
• Reasons for Innovation Management
• Whatever happened to open government and open policy? A scorecard
• PieCrust — A static website generator and lightweight CMS.
• A guide to opening government: Help us to develop a citizen engagement chapter | Involve
• Make Things Do Stuff

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Getting the digital debate going – Jimmy Leach announces the FCO's conference on cyberspace. Sounds interesting!
• Mid year review: the state of DH digital – Great honest review of activity in digital at the Dept Health
• Ofsted Parent View – Interesting "Parent's Opinion" style school feedback site from Ofsted.
• Staff, social media policies and managing risk – Good stuff from Simon Wakeman on the need for organisations to have a clear approach to social media and networking.
• Trimming the long tail – the danger of stripping back our websites – Interesting addition to the debate around the top task focus on local government websites.
• Introduction to Databases – Stanford University – Free online course. Interesting!
• Thinktanks are in crisis. To survive, they must become ‘do tanks’ – "For thinktanks to be effective, they must be imaginative and radical. But a funding crisis is making them increasing bland."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• We the People | The White House – E-petitions, White House style
• How to create sustainable open data projects with purpose – Nice article from MySociety's Tom Steinberg.
• One in six IT projects is a ‘ticking timebomb’ – University of Oxford – "A surprisingly high number of business and government technology projects are 'ticking time bombs', according to researchers at the University of Oxford. "
• Slashdot and CmdrTaco — the end of another geek era – Really nice article about a great online community
• TransferSummit | 2011: Open Innovation Everywhere – This looks like a fabulous open source jamboree.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for October 3rd through October 19th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Solace 2010 write up; Localism, hash tags and a reflection on priorities – Great write up from Catherine Howe.
• Thriving too: Big Society: Yours Mine and Ours – "So how do smaller networks, organisations and projects engage with Big Society if they don’t feel completely comfortable in the space?"
• How #gmp24 happened – "The challenge was to find a way to show people the wide range of issues the police are called to deal with."
• The Problem with WordPress at Helpful Technology: Blog – Great summary of what sounds like a great event.
• When social media reveal IT’s soft belly – "When I was in Canada last week, I visited two provincial government organizations that offered two intriguing examples of how social media are challenging their IT organizations."
• Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? – Whose in charge of getting people to talk to each other in your organisation?
• Jimmy Leach: Keep the blogs alight – "We may not solve foreign policy issues through blogs, but we can at least explain them better."
• Open source based Managed Learning platform saves public purse £36 million – Learning Pool saves government cash. Find out how.
• Too much money plays against government 2.0 – "Definitely an interesting perspective: transparency is not always a desirable attribute, and government 2.0 is more interesting – and useful – where the are scarce rather than abundant resources."
• Local By Social – Series of events around the country by LGID promoting online innovation in local gov.
• PDF Europe round up – Great summary of the recent PDF Europe event from @curiousc
• Catch.com – Interesting looking Evernote alternative.
• Training lessons learned: Code dojo, whiteboards, interactivity – "Training can be an incredibly boring, frustrating exercise."
• The four sorts of Innovation-Getter | Kate Bennet – "After working in an Innovation team for the last year it’s become apparent that there are four sorts of “innovation-getters” in organisations."
• The Stack: The Fifteen Classes of the Social Business Software Suite – Interesting attempt at classification of social tech

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Public Sector Online 2010

Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day.

I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny:

As more people use social networking sites to keep informed, and organisations use them to spread information and market services, what are the best ways for public sector bodies to engage with the public?

• The rise in the use of social networks as a line of communication
• Twittiquette – best use of Tweets
• Twitter as a public service: e.g. Gritterfeeds
• Generating and monitoring content – Social media etiquette
• Online engagement – encouraging two way usage

Joining me on the panel will be:

• Andy Gibson, co-founder, School of Everything and author, Local by Social
• Sarah Drummond, founder, mypolice.org
• Lauren Currie, director, mypolice.org
• Gordon Scobbie, assistant chief constable, West Midlands Police

Which means that, even if nobody else has any fun, at least I’ll get to hang out with some cool people for an hour or so!

If you are attending, do get in touch and let’s meet up! Twitter will probably be the easiest way.

Connected Generation 2010

Connected Generation 2010 is, in the words of chief cheerleader Tim Davies:

…a one-day conference exploring youth engagement and technology in 2010. Based on feedback from participants at recent training events, and on the positive response to the Beyond Twitter event we ran up in Wrexham last year, we’re trying a mixed Conference and Open Space format again – with a morning of top-quality input from speakers and a range of pre-planned workshops, followed with an afternoon of curated unConference, where delegates can set the agenda and direct the conversations.

It’s happening at The Watershed in Bristol on Friday, 7th May.

Some of the speakers include:

• Amy Sample Ward – co author of ‘Social by Social and expert on the use of social media in non-profit contexts;
• Katie Bacon – pioneer of digital youth work in Devon, and founder of Online Youth Outreach digital youth work training.
• Joanne Jopling – project worker for the Gateshead Young Women’s Outreach Project
• Kieron Kirkland – learning researcher at FutureLab, and lead for the Greater Expectations project
• Chris Morgan – from the Communities 2.0 in Wales, talking about digital youth and community work.

Well worth signing up if you have any kind of interest in how technology can be used to engage with young people – even better value if you use the LPOOL discount code to get a tenner off the ticket price.

Online Info call for speakers

My good friend Steve Dale is in charge of the Online Information conference this year, which should mean it’ll be an absolute belter.

The call for speakers has just been announced and you can propose a topic for a session here. I’ve republished Steve’s email below:

There is a growing recognition but not yet a consensus about integrating social media into an organisation’s workflows and business processes. There is a desire to develop more effective knowledge sharing and a culture of collaboration amongst staff, but little recognition of what this means in terms of organisational change.

Today’s organisations must be able to rapidly adapt to an increasingly volatile and economically challenging environment to remain successful, yet achieving an agile organisation that can deliver high quality products and services is no easy task and one which requires the right blend of people, processes, and technology.

The common goal that all these organisations are trying to achieve is culture: an information and knowledge sharing culture that enables the entire organisation to rapidly respond and adapt to socio-economic changes.
For most organisations, several challenges remain in developing an effective knowledge sharing and collaborative culture:

• Geographic and cultural differences
• Silos of information
• Difficulty in easily publishing information across teams and departments
• Information security
• Workforce skills

Many of these challenges are a result of legacy information systems that aren’t built for today’s knowledge worker, yet there are still abundant opportunities for Information Professionals to prove value and demonstrate worth. Why not share your experiences at Online Information 2010?Is the semantic web part of the answer?

Will the social web foster more effective knowledge sharing across the modern workplace?

Is the collaborative revolution the opportunity for a surge in information productivity – or is it just a distraction?

We want to hear from organisations that have transformed themselves to be more agile and flexible by exploiting open or linked data and conversation streams. We are looking for exciting, innovative applications as well as lessons learned from the application of Web 2.0 tools and techniques. We want to showcase organisations that are using semantic web techniques to create new and exciting resources.

Do you have a story to tell?

• Maybe you’ve been involved in creating a new application for Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google or the iPhone?
• Have you made the move to the semantic web to deal with the digital explosion and the need for greater “intelligence” in your information?
• Perhaps you’ve found ways to exploit new online tools to transform the way your organisation does its business?
• Have you changed your management processes to cope with this “always connected world”?
• Have you identified the education and training needs that will enable your staff to become more effective knowledge workers?

Then why not share it with others?The Online world is waiting to learn from the pioneers who have made it work. This is your chance to be seen as one of the leaders – with your story reaching a global audience from over 40 countries.

I look forward to receiving your proposal.

Stephen Dale
Chairman
Online Information Conference 2010

Big conference

On Monday (14th) I will be attending the Social Media World Forum Europe conference, at London’s Olympia venue. It looks like quite a big do.

I’m also going to appear on a couple of panels, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The morning’s panel – at 10:30 – is a workshop on ‘What are Politicians doing in Web 2.0?’ focusing in on:

• What tools Obama and his team used to gain success in social media space
• Who’s tweeting?
• Number 10 – how the prime minister’s office are embracing social media

I’ll be sharing a stage with Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Scott Redding of the Green Party and my good pal Simon Dickson off of Puffbox.

In the afternoon – at about 5pm –  I’ll be discussing the use of social tools behind the firewall as part of the Enterprise Social Media Forum, in a session called ‘The integration of social business software with Social Media feedback to building your business and brand’.

With me on the panel will be luminaries of the enterprise 2.0 scene David Terrar, Andy McLoughlin and Per Rombouts.

Other sessions I’ve spotted featuring friends of DavePress are Ingrid Koehler, who will be on a workshop panel discussing the impact of social media on elections, at about 11am, and Jemima Gibbons, who is discussing how to write the case for using online communities in business, sometime in the morning (it’s not quite clear on the agenda – PDF warning).