My first perk. And does blindly targeting influencers follow the ‘all news is good news’ theory?

I’m just going to come straight out with it: I’m pretty interested in online influence scoring tools like Klout and Peerindex. I think they might be useful to organisations and particularly the public sector in years to come. I understand and agree with lots of the points people make about these tools: people who thinkRead… Read more »

Walking the tightrope between best practice and negligence – things to consider when responding to targeted or advanced persistent threats

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been asked several times how incident responders should react to notification that their company has been breached by targeted or advanced persistent threats (T/APT). In every case I offer the same, simple insights: People count. A trained, analytically curious team will have a far greater chanceRead… Read more »

Write Better, Think Critically

For the next generation of government leaders, Nick Charney has several strategies to give your writing edge. And why should you care? According to him, “The ability to affectively communicate information is what puts you above everyone else.” With left-brain, creative skills of increasing importance in our economy, what differentiates you is the ability toRead… Read more »

How many things does government do?

Easy: 1,479,025,887 GDS has produced another fascinating tool, this time providing a list and volumes of government transactional services, which it turns out are used a shade under one and a half billion times a year. Richard Sargeant has a blog post introducing the endeavour, and making clear that this initial version is an alphaRead… Read more »

Engagement on a shoestring

You could probably do more digital engagement around a series of stakeholder seminars, but it would be a tall order. For the last month or so, DCMS have been running a little site we helped build for them on our Read+Comment platform, to open up discussion around a series of seminars they’re running to informRead… Read more »

This week got me thinking

I spent last week in Richmond Virginia and Washington DC. I visited old friends and made new ones. I put in a couple days of probono work for the great city of Richmond, and spoke at the Next Generation of Government Summit in DC. It’s been a whirlwind week and I am completely exhausted butRead… Read more »

Do agencies unfairly assume that households have working printers?

While chatting with government folk in Victoria yesterday, the topic of printable PDFs in websites came up. Many agencies have them – large documents designed to be read on paper, rather than screen, and designed accordingly. It made me ask the question: How many households actually have working printers and are able (and willing) toRead… Read more »

Panel: Leveraging Social Media Skills

Leveraging Social Media Skills Social media has come a long way within government agencies. Two years ago, 55 percent of agencies blocked social media sites and that is down to 19 percent today with some room for improvement. This session provided an overview of the value of digital media, its uses, trends, tips and aRead… Read more »