Link roundup

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

• The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon | Harold Jarche – "What should a true learning organisation look like?"
• Connecting and engaging inside your organisation – "Social networks are inherently bottom up and user powered. In IBM, BlueIQ worked because it had buy-in from the very top. You need both otherwise time is wasted overcoming resistance."
• Local 2.0: How digital technology empowers local communities | The Young Foundation – Useful report covering how digital innovation can impact on communities.
• The order I check things | Stephen Hale – I love reading how people do this stuff!
• Cutting down on cookies: practical tips | Puffbox.com – Useful tips from SImon Dickson.

Bookmarks for December 12th through December 30th

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

• Five (grim) predictions for 2011 – Ingrid expresses a few concerns. Let's work to make sure this stuff doesn't happen!
• What Localism might mean for local gov web managers by Michele Ide-Smith – Great stuff as always from Michele. A must read for folk interested in web and local gov.
• Teach Parents Tech – Lovely: "This site was built by a few folks at Google to help keep tech support a family business."
• Barrier Busting – DCLG crowdsourcing blockages to local action with a WordPress based site. Via @simond
• Tax protest turns Vodafone’s smile upside down – This is what happens when you use social media when everyone hates you.
• Let Us Pay – One of the best summaries of the woes of the newspaper business I have come across.
• Social media and the future of the public sector – Great notes on social tech for internal use from @jiiiii
• Wikileaks FAQ – Useful resource on the issues raised by Wikileaks.
• 13 measures of success for government digital teams – Good stuff on evaluation of online activity from Stephen Hale
• expertnet – "The United States General Services Administration (GSA) and the White House Open Government Initiative are soliciting your feedback on a concept for next generation citizen consultation, namely a government-wide software tool and process to elicit expert public participation"

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.

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.

Bookmarks for September 20th through October 1st

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

• Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change – Great stuff on deploying social tech within big organisations.
• Open Government Licence – "You are encouraged to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence, the Open Government Licence, freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions."
• Four roles for social media in workplace learning – "Whether or not l&d professionals or senior managers embrace social media doesn't really matter in the long run, because there is no turning back, only futile resistance."
• Anthologize – "Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book."
• “The Case for Personal Information Empowerment”: Mydex publishes groundbreaking White Paper – Worthwhile reading. I don't entirely agree, but a cogent argument.
• GCHQ spooks top UK Linux installations | THINQ.co.uk – "Whispers in the courtly corridors around Westminster, the seat of British government, have it that British intelligence uses Linux because it is secure, good at number crunching, and doesn't cost much to deploy."
• A framework for the social enterprise – Useful and interesting white paper on knowledge and learning within large organisations.
• Government Should Do its Own Data Homework | Jeni’s Musings – "It cannot be the case, long term, that you need to be an expert hacker to reuse government data."
• Behind the scenes at ShapeYourPlace.org – Great stuff from Paul Henderson on the techie bits behind a nice local government social media engagement exercise.
• Meeting the public sector communications challenge – "But what public sector communicators need to do is continue to demonstrate the value of communications, not as an end in itself, but as an agent for making things better for the public."
• Open Courses: About 10 Weeks Seems To Be It, Then? – Great post from Tony Hirst on open courses and online learning.
• Open Government as a Means to Shake the IT Suppliers Landscape – "…I have not (yet) seen any sustainable business model coming out of government “app stores”."
• Where do the good ideas go? – "Given the challenges we face as a country and as a planet, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make crowdsourcing really work here and now. But it will take courage, patience, and a process which taps into the varied time and talents of the crowd, in its widest sense."

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.

Bookmarks for September 10th through September 14th

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

• MindQuilt – "MindQuilt is an enterprise knowledge management platform with intelligent question and answer matchmaking and gaming achievement dynamics."
• Tiny Tiny RSS – Host your own Google Reader clone.
• Challenge.gov : The central platform for all US Government challenges, contests and innovation prizes. – "Challenge.gov is a place where the public and government can solve problems together."
• The future of digital public services – "The key to this is that Directgov should continue to move to be the facilitators not owners or delivers of the content and apps, they should establish the proper governance, standards and quality assurance for app providers, setting minimum standards that ensure quality and interoperability."
• WordPress › Email Post Changes plugin – Potentially spectacularly helpful WordPress plugin.
• Beyond Access – a "Public Consultation on access to information and open government data"
• Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash – "Moving forward, there are a lot more lessons we can learn if we build our social tools with the assumption that no one version of any document, app, or narrative needs to be the definitive one. We might even make our software, and our communities, more inclusive if we embrace the forking ourselves."
• Resources for exploring social media participation – Brill stuff from @timdavies on online youth participation.
• The Social Network: Facebook’s intriguing world revealed – "How did Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, from a comfortably middle-class background, become one of the most powerful men in the world?"
• Hand Made from Social Spaces – "Hand Made is a beautiful collaborative book with 26 innovative perspectives and projects from around the world, over 230 pages, about new ways of creating connection and community. The projects have been carefully selected because they have all been developed with new thinking and methodologies and involve Learning, Sharing or Making."
• A Brief Guide To Reaching Unbelievably High Levels Of Participation In Your Online Community – Some great tips in here.

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.

Bookmarks for August 18th through September 8th

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

• Civic Commons code-sharing initiative bids to reduce government IT costs – "Around the United States, city governments have created a multitude of software. Unfortunately, most of the time the code from those projects is not shared between municipalities, which results in duplication of effort and redundant, static software."
• Anonymity, trust and openness on the social intranet – "In some organisations, the cloak of anonymity could help to establish the first part of that trust relationship, and reassure colleagues that leaders are, in fact, really listening; once it exists, it’s easier to step out of the shadows with a greater degree of trust and openness."
• The end of history – "History will, of course, look after itself. It always has. But the future history of our time will be different from our histories of past times, and that will not be because we have an eye to the future, but because we are always relentless focused on the present."
• Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? – "…the authors suggest a way for managers to switch from a ‘command and control’ to a ‘systems thinking’ mindset in order to achieve genuine organisational learning."
• Quixly – Cool way to host and deliver paid-for content, such as e-books.
• Understanding Marin County’s $30 million ERP failure – It's not just UK government that cocks up IT projects.
• Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box" – "We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box.""
• Should Governments Legislate a Preference for Open Source? – "It's easy to legislate a preference for Open Source, and difficult to implement a level playing field upon which Open Source and proprietary software could compete fairly. Thus, a number of governments have enacted the preference as an easy-to-legislate way of solving the problem, but I submit not optimally. Having a preference gives proprietary software an opening to portray themselves as the "injured party", when the reality is that historically there has been a preference for proprietary software in both legislation and internal process of government purchasers, and this still exists today."
• Wiki life – "The point, in the end, is that Wikimedia by its DNA operates in public and benefits accrue — not just as product and engagement and promotion and distribution but also as strategy. That’s the next step in creating the truly public company or organization."
• First Impressions: VaultPress (WordPress Backup) – Nice summary of the premium backup service for WordPress (sadly just in beta at the moment).
• Sink or Swim – Donald Clark on the birth of Learning Pool and why the public sector needs it more than ever.
• Damien Katz: Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0 – Great notes on successful open source development.
• Harold Jarche » The Evolving Social Organization – "For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost."
• O’Reilly, Open Government and the Ingenuity of Enthusiasm – "It is quite clear that performance management and procurement, as well as many other government processes, need to be revised, reformed or radically changed. But this won’t happen unless we recognize that government and its employees need to remain in charge, need to stay as the custodians of neutrality and transparency, and we, the people, developers or users, can just help them do a better job but not replace them in any way."
• Research findings and recommendations for Councils – Some fantastic shared learning here from Michele.
• sigil – "Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format."
• Enterprise 2.0 Perceived Risks: Myth or Reality? – "…security is a personal thing, a personal trait that everyone needs to nurture and treasure accordingly."
• Using Free, Open-Source Software in Local Governments – "…how is it that local governments have failed to capitalize on the cost-saving and productivity-enhancing benefits of using open source software, especially given the budget crises they face?"
• Open Government Data – "This event will bring together movers and shakers from the world of open government data — including government representatives, policymakers, lawyers, technologists, academics, advocates, citizens, journalists and reusers."
• WordPress › Email Users « WordPress Plugins – "A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users."

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.

Bookmarks for June 17th through July 3rd

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

• Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean – "But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead."
• Newsroom: the backstory – "Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too."
• What do 25% cuts look like? Like this….. « Whitehall Watch – "There is zero chance cuts of this magnitude can be implemented without affecting “front line services”."
• Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software – "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."
• How to Secure Your WordPress Site From Getting Hacked: WPSecurityLock – Useful site.
• 9 signs you know you shouldn’t bother with innovation – Great stuff as always from James Gardner. How many of these can you tick off for your organisation?
• Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It? – "I'm often amazed at the lack of courage exhibited by so-called leaders who profess to value innovation."
• When Public Servants Make the Difference – "However, as one of the secret sauces of Singapore’s success is trusting its own employees, so almost all gov 2.0 success stories in the Western world share the same ingredient, i.e. they come from the intuition and the willingness to innovate of people who work in government."
• Enterprise 2.0 2010 – Enterprise 2.0 TV – Videos from the keynote speeches at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Some good stuff here.
• A timeline of open government data – Great work Tim Davies – this is really interesting!

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.

Bookmarks for June 7th through June 17th

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

• What Does Government Transformation Mean, Exactly? – "Rather than fantasizing about the myth of transformation, governments have to accept that future is no longer predictable and focus on what changes are necessary to make them more flexible and nimble to adapt to uncertainty."
• open data doesn’t empower communities | internet.artizans – "Open data doesn't empower communities. I'm not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact."
• The battle for data, the battle for design | Public Strategist – "The availability of data is a critical enabler, but what matters in the end is what it enables."
• Re-use of open data and applying the same idea within WCC – "…the beginning of a universal API for the organisation." Wowza.
• Better Junk Mail – Quick Analysis from the Enterprise 2.0 World – "The positive side is more along the lines of companies realizing the smarts they have in their employees heads and the horizontal connections – and then, of course, re-orienting work to take advantage of them and (we’d hope) figure out compensating employees beyond the org. tree."
• Government 2.0: If Engaging is Difficult, Keeping Engaged is More So – "What keeps me going is the use of my blog as my personal knowledge base. Many times, when I prepare a client inquiry, a presentation or a research note, I can go back to the blog and find an example, a nugget, a pesky comment that help me do the job I am measured and paid for."
• Empire Disruption – BankerVision – "My experience is that big organsiations create situations where the politics of success dictate you grow your control of people and resources, even when that is counterproductive to the task you're actually supposed to be achieving. "
• Lists made easy + social + fun! – twtPickin – Nice tool for collaborating on lists with twitter buddies
• Diplodocus – A community for international digital government people – "…a community of people doing international facing digital work for governments"
• iAnnotate for iPad – "iAnnotate is both an elegant PDF reader and a powerful annotation tool that finally lets you work with your PDFs. You can open documents from email, sign and send out contracts fast, enter notes for edits, sketch diagrams, copy text, and add highlights or underline with the drag of a finger!"

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.

Bookmarks for June 3rd through June 7th

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

• Armchair Auditor – Nice clean and simple example of what can be done with open government spending data by @adrianshort
• Supreme Court’s untendered website cost revealed – "You need to ask yourself whether £360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result – with better functionality – for 95% less."
• Why I’m fed up of talking about social media, really – "Sure it’s great that lots of councils are interested in social media and what it can do for their communications. But what is really starting to annoy me is that too many councils are asking the wrong questions."
• Zotero | Home – "Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources." – via @jjn1
• Local Data wiki – Great idea to create a wiki explaining opendata to local government types.
• Centre for Digital Citizenship – "The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area."
• Yammer Introduces Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Integration – Potentially significant move.
• So You Want to Switch to Android…One Man’s iPhone to Nexus One Migration – "Android is ready for prime time. It’s not going to beat the iPhone – not yet – but it’s ready for mainstream users."
• Publishing itemised local authority expenditure – advice for comment | data.gov.uk – "The Prime Minister has made a specific commitment that new items of local government spending over £500 be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011" – and here's how to do it.
• Good and bad transparency – Great post from Steph on the implications of opening up government data.

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.

Bookmarks for May 14th through June 2nd

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

• TWiki – the Open Source Enterprise Wiki – "A flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform, and web application platform."
• How digital engagement can save councils money – A great paper from Anthony at the Democratic Society. Read this!
• Living in a world of the merely improbable – Great post, covering why organisations need to figure out their approach to digital and how it can help them get through the cuts.
• Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt speak out on web institute axing | Technology | guardian.co.uk – "Web inventor says that open government data will become increasingly important – but that 'immediate decisions had to be made' on spending."
• Instant messaging: This conversation is terminated – Interesting article on the decrease in use of IM – it's Facebook's fault, it would appear.
• And The Long Sought Replacement For Email Is . . . | Forrester Blogs – "Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts (count me in) have argued for several years that Email’s manifest deficiencies could and would be overcome with open, social, and dynamic 2.0-based communication and collaboration tools. However, there’s also long been the recognition that Email – or rather, Email users – would not go down without a fight."
• The Coalition: what now for digital? at Helpful Technology – "In terms of public sector IT at least, it looks broadly as through the principles and plans outlined by the Conservatives over the last six months are being brought into effect, with added emphasis on civil liberties."
• Designing the Big (Civil) Society – it’s DIY time – "But in my experience, whether it’s a group of activists, social entrepreneurs or local government officers, you can’t assume people will easily start co-designing new stuff together – particularly if that involves adding technology. People need to get to know and trust each other, tell stories about what’s worked and what hasn’t, filter inspirational ideas against local realities, think about who does what, where the money comes from, and so on. That’s particularly difficult when you are doing that with less funds then before – as will certainly be the case."
• The Future of Open Data Looks Like…Github? – "the future to me in this area seems clear: we’re going to see transformation of datasets incorporated into the marketplaces. As the demand for public data increases, the market will demand higher quality, easier to work with data."
• Government needs a SkunkWorks – "What's stopping us spooling up a Skunkworks? Nothing but the momentum which continues to carry us down the old path. It's inertia, but, as I said, we're at the dawn of something new. Personally, I'm confident that all manner of things which would have been difficult before will now become possible."

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.