Five for Friday (19/5/17)

Five more nuggets of interest I’ve spotted this week:

1. Jessica Lessin built a business to prove information doesn’t have to be free – great podcast about the different models emerging for journalism online. The Information is a great site, by the way (I’m a subscriber).
2. The Department for Health’s fantastic digital team are hiring a Content Editor. You have until 28th May 2017 to apply.
3. The Weird Thing About Today’s Internet – fantastic piece looking at the last ten years of the web.
4. Making local authority data work for you – useful looking resource on open data delivered by the ODI and LGA in partnership (I think).
5. James Governor summarises Microsoft’s Build conference for us in three minutes:

These have all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

Link roundup

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

• An Open Letter to Software Suppliers – 13 Ways to Help the Public Sector to the Cloud – @copley_rich
• Why the obsession with “coding” misses the point – from @jjn1
• “Whatsapp and $19bn” – great writeup
• Love this: “How To Create A Self-Paced Email Course”
• Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively
• Civil servants believe government departments lack skills to achieve “digital by default” #dsitwp
• A mini #housingcamp about #channelshift | Housing Camp
• New research: How do hyperlocals contribute to local democracy and what do they need?
• Birmingham maptastic from @curiousc #nhscitizen #digitalhealth
• Agile Content: The Future of Digital Content Creation? – from @futuregov

Link roundup

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

• Don’t drown in email! How to use Gmail more efficiently
• twister : peer to peer microblogging platform (interesting from privacy/decentralisation angle)
• Why blogging still matters in business – and always will — @euan
• In 2014, let’s get digital skills out of the classroom – @lesteph
• Do people really care about personal data? – Mydex
• Network Stories: Hacking Complex, Ongoing News by @timdavies
• 10 tips for managing your time on social networks « Learning in the Social Workplace
• The almost-post mortem for Patch — BuzzMachine

Link roundup

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

• Taming the Python – geting started programming on your Raspberry Pi
• Battle for the planet of the APIs
• Returning to Free Software: A Guide
• Robots and Robber Barons – NYTimes.com via @euan
• Onion Pi – Make a Raspberry Pi into a Anonymizing Tor Proxy!
• Why Java Is Still Relevant — I.M.H.O. — Medium
• Lights, camera, democracy in action – New rights for journalists and bloggers to film council meetings
• Introducing the new digital inclusion team | Government Digital Service
• MediaGoblin – free software media publishing platform
• Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use — Tech News and Analysis

The digital press office

One innovation in the way that local councils communicate is the developments of digital press offices, or newsrooms.

There are two elements to these, I think. The first is having a digital savvy communications team, who get the growing importance of online new sources and the need for mixed media; as well as the increasingly realtime nature of news reporting. This tends to be the result of already existing inspiration in the team or through training.

The second is having the means to deliver on this, often through an online platform. Some examples of these include Birmingham, Shropshire, and Leeds who all have separate microsites for their digital newsrooms. I hear that Warwickshire have one in development that is close to release.

Often these site are using a lightweight, flexible publishing system like WordPress, rather than being a part of the corporate content management system (CMS). Why is this? I suspect there are several reasons:

• Speed – using a tool like WordPress you can circumnavigate some of the process and workflow associated with a big enterprise CMS and get messages live as soon as you need them
• Flexibility – WordPress and tools like it can handle pretty much any content you throw at it, whether text, images, audio, video
• Conversation – the inbuilt commenting engine in WordPress means you can have a discussion with journalists and other media outlets – again, not the sort of thing that happens often on a corporate CMS

One way that such a platform can be used is to develop online news releases, rather than the more static traditional variety. Rather than sending out a PDF or Word document to journalists, the release can b published online, and the link sent out to people – so if there are any amendments made, the latest version is always the one that’s out there.

Photos, videos, related links and documents to download can all be embedded in there as well, so everyone has all the available media resources to work with as well.

What’s more, this way of doing things ensures a bit of visibility, and findability too. Rather than sending your release to the list of people you know, which is obviously pretty finite, by making it searchable online, many different people are likely to find it, and make use of it, whether they are newspapers or hyperlocal bloggers or whoever.

If you’re interested in developing a digital press office, or newsroom, at your organisation, do get in touch!

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.

Oh dear, Andrew Marr…

I don’t tend to respond to this sort of thing, but this one pressed several of my buttons.

The so-called “citizen journalists” will never offer a real replacement to newspapers and television news, he told Cheltenham Literature Festival.

He said: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.”

Sigh.

First point – the irony of Marr insulting people due to the appearance of physical features attached to their heads is hard to ignore.

Second – I’m no particular fan of journalism as a profession, especially given all the bleating about it that goes on in the mainstream media. Journalists write stuff down. There really isn’t that much that’s special about it. Lots of people can do it, and they are doing so. Get over it.

Thirdly, bloggers are angry ranters, are they? Has Marr read any of the columns that appear in newspapers every day of the week? Is he entirely unaware of the filth peddled by the likes of Jan Moir on a regular basis?

Finally, and the bit that really gets my goat: the lazy assumption that people who like computers are weird, scabby losers that hang out in their bedrooms all day long. I’ve said it before, but the fact that wearing ignorance of technology as a badge of honour is still acceptable these days is a disgrace, and it’s the sort of tosh that Marr is trotting out here that only encourages it.

“Angry rant” over.

Bookmarks for August 5th through August 11th

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

• Splashpath – “Splashpath is a free service for Leisure Operators to create, update and communicate swimming pool timetables”
• The Value of Transparency Is At The Boundary between Government and Society – “Open government is not a way to outsource problem solutions to others.”
• More on Apps for Elephants | Public Strategist – Further exposition from Stefan on the ‘should gov develop mobile apps?’ debate.
• Devour – “Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.”
• Don’t Get Fireballed | brown blog – Nice guide to protecting a WordPress site from traffic overload.
• Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft – Looks interesting and cool, though not sure I fully understand it
• Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992 – “HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.”
• 10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization – Handy list.
• UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech – “The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.”
• Crowdsourcing Is Far From Easy for Government – “Once again, this case proves the disconnect between engaging citizens (and voters) and engaging government employees. For open government to work, both aspects need to be addressed and possibly synchronized.”

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 April 25th through April 30th

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

• More plugins for securing your WordPress install – Useful guide for making WP a bit more impregnable.
• Introducing the Hybrid Organisation –
• Hacking UK Politics with IBM Middleware: open data, mashups, and uh… WebSphere – Cool looking mashup by guys at IBM described by James Governor
• CIOs Brainstorm About Government 2.0: Good Ideas But Not Bold Enough – "So, why do government people insist to “build something” with web 2.0 rather than realizing that in most cases people self-organize and select the channel they want to use or the community they want to belong to? Why do they focus so much on “citizens” and so little on “employees”?"
• Government Online | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project – Interesting statistics from the US on general e-government stuff.
• W3 Total Cache – "The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. "
• Social on the Outside needs Social Business on the Inside :: Blog :: Headshift – "The focus of my talk was the idea that hanging shiny social media baubles on the cold, hard external walls of a corporate organisation runs the risk of creating a false brand promise unless this work has strong internal underpinnings in the form of social business structures that can do something about the noise, insights and feedback that outbound communications generate."
• Web 2.0 training materials – A fantastic resource from the Scottish Government Library Services. Great material, and a wonderful example of sharing.
• CASE STUDY: How Walsall museum is cooler than Ben Stiller – More great work and great blogging from Dan Slee and Walsall Council.
• WW2History.com – Launching 4th May, 2010 – "A multimedia resource on the most devastating conflict in history, brought to you by award winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees."

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.