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 »
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 »
Good morning. I am live blogging from the Ministry of Finance in Paris, France, where I am participating in an event hosted by the Institut de la Gestion Publique (Institute for Public Management). This marks the 10th year of an annual event and this year’s theme is “Generation Y and Public Management: Issues and Implications.”Read… Read more »
Judgmental appears to be a new free case law service for the UK. Judgmental‘s content appears to include case law from the UK, ECJ, ECHR, and Ireland. The years of coverage seem to vary for each court. The Judgmental Website doesn’t appear to include a detailed description of its content, so one must browse inRead… Read more »
The Foreign Office tweets – in fact it tweets a lot. We have over 70 twitter channels and we tweet in more than 14 languages. We tweet from British embassies, high commissions and ambassadors across the globe, covering a whole range of foreign policy issues. We were one of the first adopters of twitter inRead… Read more »
Maybe those are the best kind? I am struggling to find the space to fit the words in. Or rather, the space to let the words out into. So we shall have a go here and see what comes. Local government is a strange place, I’ve decided. Nothing happens at all for months. Or atRead… Read more »
The MJ reports on Buckinghamshire County Council’s successful bid to reduce the number of members elected to it, from 57 to 49, in the name of cost cutting. County deputy leader Bill Chapple said: ‘I’m delighted the commission is taking our proposals forward. We are living in a time of austerity when tough decisions haveRead… Read more »
So this is pretty awesome. The UK has produced a real-time snow map application. This app searches Twitter for real-time snow reports and displays them on the map. A map shows up on the screen with “snow clusters” which determine how much snow is in a given area. Users tweet the hashtag #uksnow, their locationRead… Read more »
Thought I’d share my (rather *comprehensive* / lengthy) presentation to solace 2010 last week. It’s not often you get to speak to 200 of the top managers in UK local government, so I thought I’d throw the kitchen sink at them in the hope that some of it would stick. As you can see fromRead… Read more »
A few days ago, I was at the excellent PdfEU conference , and pulling together the notes for the wittering I was asked to do meant that I had to do the very useful and healthy process of pottering round the digital estate of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and working out the successes,Read… Read more »