Collecting stories of interactive government

As mentioned previously, I’m writing a book. The best books, apparently, have good stories – and so I need some good stories.

At the same time, I’m seeing loads of requests for examples of effective use of the web, social media and other related stuff in public services. What’s needed is a nice resource full of good stories…

Back in the day, I ran a little event in Peterborough called ReadWriteGov. It was meant to be one of many, but that didn’t really happen. I’ve been sat on the domain since, wondering what to do with it.

So what I have decided to do is to start collecting stories of interactive government – the most comprehensive description I can come up with for using cool internet stuff in public services.

Right now, there’s not a lot there, except for a link to a survey. If you have a great example of use of digital engagement in public services, please fill it in!

(Yes, I know it’s SurveyMonkey. But it was quick, and easy.)

Maybe you have managed an awesome council FaceBook page. Perhaps your youth service website rocks. It could be that you ran a superbly integrated public safety campaign.

It could be internal or external. One organisation or several in partnership. It could be a time limited project, or ongoing work. You could be a council, central government department, a quango, a police service, a fire and rescue service, part of the health sector or a community group delivering a service.

Whatever it is, as long as it has a connection with public services and online innovation, I want to know about it!

What I will then do is read through what you’ve send, write it up as a case study for publication on the proper site (once it’s done). I’ll send you a copy for checking first, so don’t worry.

This way we will build up a high quality collection of great examples of digital engagement, with the associated learning, all accessible online. All the content will be categorised and tagged, so you can find stuff easily, and we’ll keep the comments turned on, so conversations can take place about the stories.

Also, I’ll take the best of the stories, phone the authors up for a chat, maybe visit them, and then re-write them for inclusion in my book.

Again, here’s the survey link. Please complete it if you can, or if not, pass it on.

Thanks!

Bookmarks for April 30th through May 14th

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

• Should the Public Sector pay for Content Management Systems? « Carl’s Notepad – [with open source] "You will still need to consider the integration aspects but open source products are far more likely to integrate (openness is key) then the big supplier products (no motivation to integrate)."
• Office 2010: the SharePoint factor – "The simple conclusion then is that to make sense of Office 2010 you need SharePoint 2010. The snag is that SharePoint is not something to roll out casually. Although it has a huge number of interesting features, it is also complex and easy to break. "
• No Overall Control – a Future State of ICT – "To really address the gap between people in ICT and people who work in the Business (people outside of ICT) you actually need to start moving the competencies that IT Professionals have into the Business."
• The Fate of the Semantic Web – "While many survey participants noted that current and emerging technologies are being leveraged toward positive web evolution in regard to linking data, there was no consensus on the technical mechanisms and human actions that might lead to the next wave of improvements – nor how extensive the changes might be."
• tecosystems » I Love WordPress But… – "the reasons we self-host our WordPress instances are being eliminated at an accelerating rate"
• Meatball Wiki – "Meatball is a community of active practitioners striving to teach each other how to organize people using online tools."
• Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services – ReadWriteCloud – "Amazon is quietly pursuing the multi-billion dollar federal cloud computing market, intensifying an already fast accelerating sales and marketing effort by Google, Microsoft and a host of others."
• What’s Wrong With CSS – "Most of all, what I've learned from this exercise in site theming is that CSS is kind of painful. I fully support CSS as a (mostly) functional user interface Model-View-Controller. But even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice."
• WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM – "People can enter a contact form on your site, and the lead goes straight into Salesforce CRM: no more copy pasting lead info, no more missing leads: each and every one of them is in Salesforce.com for you to follow up."
• A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Examples – Nice resource. Some great examples in here.
• Headshift Projects: Projects by Sector – Nice collection of social software case studies.

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.