All postings and discussions

Vote for your Park: nothing but a bad idea?

Featured. Posting written by Tiago Peixoto about 1 year ago.
Last comment 19 days ago, 13 Comments.

The London government has launched an initiative called “Vote for your Park”, where Londoners can decide where to allocate ten grants of up to £400,000 for London's parks. Voting can be made through the Internet, SMS and postal voting. Since the launch of the initiative there has been criticism about the security of the system and the participatory design of the initiative. I do not know very much about local governments in the UK and I am not at all a specialist in secur...

posted in UK parks ParticipatoryBudgeting

Canterbury university start shared services postgrad - despite no evidence for shared services

Posting written by Facipulator 23 days ago. No comments yet.

Canterbury Christ Church University have shockingly decided to begin an 'academic' post graduate qualification in shared services. Shared services has no evidence to support it, apart from economies of scale. Unfortunately economies of scale is a myth. Here is some evidence and I invite Canterbury to provide some evidence for its course. Why do we believe in economies of scale? Economies of scale - a myth!   

Why do we believe in economy of scale?

Featured. PDF uploaded by Facipulator about 1 month ago. No comments yet.

Professor John Seddon asks the question 'Why do we believe in economy of scale?' the answer is an uncomfortable reality that if confronted could transform the UK public sector. A must read for public sector and government leaders. For more see The Systems Thinking Review http://www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk/

Creating a Transparent Policy Process

Featured. PDF uploaded by Paul Johnston 3 months ago. No comments yet.

The attached 4-page document seeks to identify some of the key elements of an open policy-making process. Very interested in any reactions in particular suggested improvements!

Ageing well in a connected world (Point of view)

Featured. PDF uploaded by kevinjo about 1 year ago.
Last comment 2 months ago, 1 Comment.

The economic and social implications of our ageing society continue to grow. This is unchartered territory for which - like other macro issues like climate change and globalisation - networked communication technologies will play a huge part in addressing effectively.  Cisco's "Ageing Well" programme is addressing this premis; the attached POV outlines the considerations on which this work is based and is shared here f...

posted in Age IBSGWhitepaper

Multi-channel citizen engagement: the Ipatinga PB experience (PB part 3)

Featured. Posting written by Tiago Peixoto about 1 year ago.
Last comment 3 months ago, 3 Comments.

Following this series of posts about Participatory Budgeting (PB), I would like to describe an experiment in the coordination of which I had the pleasure to participate, which took place in the framework of the e-Agora Project (co-financed by the EC) in the city of Ipatinga, Brazil.  Prior to 2001, community leaders of the city of Ipatinga collected written proposals for public works from citizens during neighbourhood meetings which were then submitted for deliberation in PB in loco m...

posted in ParticipatoryBudgeting e-Democracy

Books on How to Accomplish Greater Things With Others

Posting written by KareAnderson (New User) 3 months ago. No comments yet.

A sign of the growing popularity of all kinds of collaboration is the growing number of books on some aspect of the topic.  What are your favorites? Here are some I’ve come across: Alone Together: Sociable Robots, Digitized Friends, and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude by Sherry Turkle. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi....

When Desperate Times Call for Participatory Measures

Featured. Posting written by Tiago Peixoto about 1 year ago.
Last comment 3 months ago, 3 Comments.

41 U.S. states currently face budget gaps, and judging by the forecasts of even the most optimistic specialists, such a situation is far from being substantially changed in the near future. In this context, it is particularly interesting to highlight the few ICT mediated initiatives that are starting to take place at the subnational (state) level in the United States, aiming – at least supposedly – to get citizens involved in the budgetary process. For instance, in Novemb...

posted in ParticipatoryBudgeting US engagement

Public Sector Futures in The Connected Republic III

Posting written by msweeks about 1 year ago.
Last comment 4 months ago, 4 Comments.

Third part in a series leading up to the Public Services Summit in Stockholm in December If we’re going to have a discussion about the future of the public sector, we need to have a discussion about its role and function.  What exactly is it we expect the public sector to do as it evolves into the 21st century?  What are the challenges to which we want the public sector to be able to respond?  To be blunt, what exactly is the point of the public sector? Traditionally, t...

posted in nobel

Achieving Massive Citizen Involvement in Policy-Making

Featured. Posting written by Paul Johnston 5 months ago.
Last comment 4 months ago, 1 Comment.

  Today (March 22) UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a major speech on building Britain’s Digital Future which included a commitment to opening “the door to new ways of enabling people to influence and even decide public policy”. And of course this is also something the Conservative Opposition have committed to. So how do you do it? Well, any new citizen participation platform needs to extremely user-friendly – you need to be able to go there, find the issue y...

Video: John Seddon to Scottish Finance Committee 'When you learn to study & manage value you drive costs out of the system'

Featured. Video shared by Facipulator 4 months ago.
Last comment 4 months ago, 1 Comment.

Video of Professor John Seddon giving evidence to the Scottish Finance Committee began at 1:16:10  Compelling watching as it shows how groupthink of economies of scale, best practice and other such thinking is spread about by a compliance culture. When we study how the system performs from the customers perspective and gather evidence of this performance in the form of data, many of the myths of management are exposed.  If the embed doesn't work use the link below: http://news.bb... Watch video

posted in Carbon Footprint, Carbon Calculator, Footprint Calculator, Carbon Footprint Calculator, Carbon Footprints, Carbon Offset, Carbon Emissions, Reducing Carbon Footprint, Carbon Footprints, GHG Emissions, Reduce Carbon Footprint, Your Carbon Footprint, My Car

Deliverology Destroys Service: Seddon provides evidence that Michael Barber's targets regime damaged UK public sector service

Video shared by Facipulator 4 months ago.
Last comment 4 months ago, 1 Comment.

John Seddon at his funniest, most insightful and all with evidence.  Keep an eye out for Michael Barber as Mickey Mouse! :-) Watch video

An Experiment in Open Government or What a Brave New UK Government Might Do

Featured. Posting written by Paul Johnston 6 months ago.
Last comment 4 months ago, 4 Comments.

  Problem statement: Governments have improved consultation processes and experimented with other ways of getting citizens involved in policy-making, but policy-making is still seen as a black box that people feel excluded from. Also despite government efforts to listen more to outside voices including frontline public sector workers, the process of agreeing a change package can encourage a bunker mentality where potential problems (or implementation improvements) are missed in the dri...

Leveraging e-Government at a Time of Financial and Economic Crisis

PDF uploaded by Tiago Peixoto 4 months ago. No comments yet.

For those interested in the use of ICT tools in budget monitoring (a component of the PB process) I would like to draw your attention to the United Nations e-Government Survey document, which has just been released: “Leveraging e-Government at a Time of Financial and Economic Crisis”In chapter 1 “Stimulus Funds, Transparency and Trust”, of which I am the author, I try to present some cases and analysis of ICT usage in the allocation of crisis response funds aroun...

Damage caused to the Independent Sector by the UK public sector commissioning regime

PDF uploaded by Facipulator 4 months ago. No comments yet.

The report outlines the impact of the commissioning regime on services in the independent sector. It shows how outsourcing, personalisation and targets have all caused damage. The full report can be accessed at http://www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk/index.php?pg=18&backto=1&utwkstoryid=254