Maybe Friday afternoons make people bolder. But I think there’s a longer-term shift happening. Last Friday, the ever-interesting insider @pubstrat published an interesting piece gently critiquing the new e-petitions service, arguing — rightly, I think — that requiring petitioners to specify the responsible central government Department for their issue is a step backwards: A solutionRead… Read more »
Here’s the latest of our mini-guides to social technology, where we have had a go at explaining what Facebook is all about. It’s embedded below, but if you can’t see it, you can visit the Kind of Digital site and download the PDF. What is Facebook? View more documents from Kind of Digital Possibly relatedRead… Read more »
Do you have a few hundred Facebook friends? According to the Pew Research Center, you’re pretty typical. A new report looks at how social networking affects our lives in terms of trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement. A few findings: Over half of all adult social networkers are over the age ofRead… Read more »
I have read three blog posts in the last few days which together strike me as indicators of a welcome trend. The first two were both from the new Government Digital Service blog, the first from Mike Bracken on his first few weeks in government as Director of Digital. It’s a very upbeat assessment, butRead… Read more »
In yesterday’s post, @psychemedia described how combining data from different sources could create new insights for people (and indeed staff!) on their local services… Well, the University of Lincoln (@lisc_) have come up with a tool that does just that! MashMyGov is a way of enabling you to do just that. Getting provocative about dataRead… Read more »
(image source) Are you ever at a party, or with some friends and start twitching to check your phone? Do you ever tweet or post a Facebook update just to experience the high of the response? If so, is technology the new smoking? Lots of scary parallels here. Many join social media sites initially toRead… Read more »
GovLoopers – Join the thousands of Americans who will be volunteering to serve others during the September 11th weekend. Since this is the 10th anniversary of September 11th, we all should make a commitment to serve others. Watch this video and go to http://www.mygooddeed.org/ to post your 9/11 Tribute for this year, mentioning whatever goodRead… Read more »
I’ve been studying the Tao Te Ching lately. Here are some tips I’ve extracted that can be applied to any online community. 1. Spend time in your community. Delight in their doings. The only way you will truly learn how to lead a community is to spend time in, and with your members. Learn whatRead… Read more »
Some experiments in collecting images + location from mobile devices Over the last couple of years I’ve been fascinated with technology that collects and aggregates mappable information. Specifically I have been searching for or creating tools that have these properties: Lets users discover things near them, allows submission of location, photos and text Built onRead… Read more »
This track was a potent mix of tech talk and policy talk, including some candid discussions of the different views taken by different actors on the meaningful use requirements in ARRA, and a look at how much government policies can change a conservative industry. http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/report-from-open-source-conven.html