I’m not dead, I’m a dad
When a ye olde colleague emailed me with the strange question, ‘Are you dead?’ I replied, ’No, I’m a dad’.
He was asking because I hadn’t blogged since Pixie Lott was number one, and he was disappointed because he found my blog had been one good way to keep up on digital in government.
I told him that it was simply that I now had additional responsibilities at home in the form of a bouncing baby boy. And, when Ben was taking a break from bouncing to finally go to sleep, blogging was really quite far from my thoughts.
Still, if I was going to take his flattery I also had to take his point and get posting – check – even if I’m slightly cheating by riffing on what I emailed back to him in the form of four recommendations for blogs that cover central government’s use of digital.
I picked my recommendations based on the fact that I like reading them and they have posted regularly through the year offering genuinely unique insights. So well done them.
On my desktop this week… ‘Untitled #20′ by Filip Dujardin
'Untitled #20' by Filip Dujardin
This is my favourite from a series called ‘Fictions’ by digital artist, Filip Dujardin.
His architectural creations are from a parallel dystopia. Unemcumbered by the laws of architecture, he has constructed completely original building dimensions and layouts, which are nonetheless distrurbingly familiar.
You can tour the rest of ‘Fictions’ at www.filipdujardin.be.
On my desktop this week… ‘A day in the life’ by Dan Hipp
'A day in the life' by Dan Hipp
As a hooj fan of Indiana Jones and illustration this cartoon just makes me smile and smile.
Dan Hipp is an amazing talent who mashes up zombies with TinTin and Star Wars through to Super Mario Bros. and back again. Love it!
I put in on a #FF0080 background to bring out the colours.
Recommended reading… the quantified self, BBC’s multi-lingual websites and British attitudes towards UK’s international priorities
'On the platform, reading' by moriza
People still read, right?
‘The Measured Life’ by Emily Singer in Technology Review
Whether it is to get fitter, better or just to have a go at hacking the human condition, people are beginning to turn ’big data’ technologies on their sleep, diets and productivity. Athletes and sufferers of certain medical conditions have been at it for years, but evidently the ‘quantified self’ is going mainstream and it’s bound to be big business.
The FCO publishes in 50+ languages on our platform and in 20+ languages on the social web. We know a thing or two about multi-lingual publishing. But there is still an awful lot we can learn from the way the BBC Worldservice approaches publishing its non-English websites. What I find impressive is the way the Worldservice provides custom editorial in so many languages yet maintains consistency in user journeys and page layouts. This blog post is about how they do it.
This is the second survey of British attitudes towards the UK’s international priorities that Chatham House has developed with YouGov. The survey examined the attitudes of two groups – the first a representative sample of GB adults, and the second a group of ‘opinion-formers’. The differences between the two are fascinating but what is truly revealing are the discontinuities in the public’s thinking about foreign policy. The ultimate conclusion, for me, is that there is a lot of communication and engagement that needs to get a lot better.
On my desktop this week… ‘La Tierra Prometida’ by Paco Pomet
'La Tierra Prometida' by Paco Pomet
I can’t remember how, when or where I came across Pac0 Pomet. But when you see his surreal paintings you don’t forget them easily.
Government digital service: is the feeling mutualised?
Government’s use of digital media is undergoing radical change. As digital media use has become more mainstream and critical – first to communications, then policy-making through engagement and more recently for transactions – so too has government steadily rationalised its digital operations. That trend is now coming to a head with the establishment of the Government Digital Service, which will provide centralised services, a single domain and web platform for all government departments and [most of] their agencies to use.
That each department and agency will no longer have its own, separate domain, CMS, hosting arrangement, support contract, analytics account and maybe central web team is genuinely radical. But could the delivery of government digital services be more radical still?
Frances Maude’s speech at Civil Service Live 2011 made me think so. In that speech he floated the idea of giving public sector staff the right to form new mutuals and bid to take over the services they deliver. Could government digital services be a candidate for mutualisation? In this post I suggest that it could.
Recommended reading… Google is a normal company, the most menancing malware in history and putting strategies to the test
'The Best Way to Read a Book' by pixelevangelist
A few good long reads that I think are well worth the time…
‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic
Evgeny Morozov uses a book review of two new studies of Google as a company to do an iconoclast job on the Silicon Valley behamoth. It’s cutting stuff. He calls Google ‘a for-profit American company that combines the simplistic worldview of George W. Bush with the cold rationality of Barack Obama’. Perhaps, the most painful accusation that Morozov makes is that Google is an not exceptional corporation and its inability to accept this is dangerous not just the company but for us all.
Morozov says ‘writing about Google presents an almost insurmountable challenge. To understand the company and its impact, one needs to have a handle on computer science, many branches of philosophy (from epistemology to ethics), information science, cyberlaw, media studies, sociology of knowledge, public policy, economics, and even complexity theory’; but in this article he gives it a good stab. May I suggest, as an apertif, Steven Levy’s Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social.
A proper whodunit? for the cyber age. Expertly written by Agatha Christie of the cybersecurity genre (just made that up). I shall say no more.
The Office invited Charles Roxburgh in – over our lunch break – to tell us how McKinsey & Company approach strategy. There were lots of good insights from a man who really knows his business strategy (and the American Civil War) and amongst these one of the most useful, I thought, was the 10-point test McKinsey applies to the strategies of its clients to determine whether they are good or bad examples. Lots of useful further reading pegged off the article itself.
'Misty Trees' by Hannah Skoonberg
I am trying to get better at identifying tree species. I am also trying to get better at photographing trees; I never seen to be able to catch their character.
An artist who I think does capture trees beautiful is the printmaker, Hannah Skoonberg. Her portfolio is at www.skoonberg.com.
The example I’ve drawn on here reminds me of the forests I used to walk in as a kid. I could stare into it for ages.
Eden at 10 – What a disused clay mine taught us about good leadership of people and projects
'Eden Project is 10' logo
When you think of the Eden Project you think of plants. So the book about ‘Eden‘ by it’s founder, Tim Smit, is going to be about plants.
In fact, there are hardly any plants in ‘Eden’. There’s no room for them because on every page there are portraits and portrayals of the people who worked to bring us the Eden Project. There really are loads of them and their story is fascinating.
Harnessing people to a dream
We think of the Eden Project as being built of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene but it is in fact made from people. The people in ‘Eden’ swarm like a bivouac of worker ants, linking up to nurture and protect something truly unique and valuable, and at the centre of it all – holding the concept – is Tim Smit.
The Eden Project is about plants but the reason is people. It was launched to be an educational and social enterprise that would demand public attention on a superb scale. But such ambition does not deliver itself easily. ‘Eden’ captures and emphasises the depth of enterprise, teamwork and leadership that went into the realisation of an attraction that over 10 million people have travelled to experience, and which to all intents and purposes had its genesis in a Cornish pub.
Tim Smit uses the opportunity of ‘Eden’ to reel off his thanks to as many of the characters as he can who mucked in along the way. He gives each the stage and tells us about what they did, how they did it in their own unique way and how none of the Eden Project would have been possible without them. But the book is not just an extended acknowledgements page; it is a great story with as many vivid twists and turns and suspenses and feel-good endings as any classic of fiction.
Here’s what’s been keeping me enthralled on the commute this week…
1. With China projected to overtake the United States in terms of economic output within the next ten years, many commentators are again speaking of a new ‘Asian century’ and the ‘decline of the West’. At Chatham House recently, Niall Ferguson drew on the last 600 years of world history to offer an insight into the changing global balance in terms not only of economics but also of geopolitics and ‘soft power’. Transcripts, video and audio are on http://chathamhouse.org.uk/events/view/-/id/1945/.
2. Adam Curtis consistently causes me think again about what I think I know. His new documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is classic Curtis fare: sinsiter music + archive footage + dogma + elites perpetrating that dogma + scathing critique = licence fee well spent. But I am an even bigger fan of his blog, and this article on the ‘idea of humanitarian intervention‘ I found provocative against the backdrop of Mladic’s arrest, extradition and trial.
3. Consultation is a ‘set piece’ of government. Doing it better online is a coalition commitment. But how? As well as tackling search, usability and agile development on a centralised government website, an Alphagov sub-team also turned their attentions to consultation and policy engagement. What they came up with was a succint and persuasive proposal that deserves attention and further development, particularly what it has to say about ‘layering’. There’s an introduction from Neil Williams and a copy of the deck on the Alphagov project blog- http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/a-vision-for-online-consultation-and-policy-engagement.
