UK 7 articles

Copy_of_diogo_vasconcelos_by_jo_o_oliveira_silva004_medium Diogo Vasconcelos

"Placing power in the hands of those who use our public services": UK's new policy embraces open government

last updated over 4 years ago, 2 Comments

  The British Prime-Minister will announce today its vision for the future shape of public services. The policy document Working Together - Public Services On Your Side explains "the steps the Government is taking to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services. Reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society." "We will put people first by placing power in the hands...

posted in empowerment UK Transparency

Martin_medium msweeks

Fit for purpose..the machine is broken

last updated over 4 years ago, 3 Comments

This might be one for my UK colleagues in the first instance.  A new report from UK public sector think tank REFORM suggests that the Whitehall bureaucracy is no longer 'fit for purpose'.  This is an extract from its executive summary: The systemic weaknesses in Whitehall have built up over the years and are now of critical proportions...the reasons for this are entrenched – the culture and structure of Whitehall rewards risk avoidance and punishes innovation. One public se...

posted in publicservice UK governmentmachine

Hp-main_medium dave briggs

LocalGovCamp

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Following the success of the recent Barcamp for UK Government, a local government specific version is being planned - it's likely to be taking place on a Saturday in June, 2009, and will almost certainly be held in Birmingham. A blog has been set up where more details can be found. The event will be free to attend and anyone in local governmet is welcome to come along. I thought it worth raising here in case anyone from local government outside the UK is reading, because it would be really ...

posted in localgovt UK

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Campaigning 2.0

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Dave has a great post looking at a specific political campaign (the Conservative "Honest Food" campaign) and suggesting how it could be improved to be more in the spirit of Web 2.0 and really give people a chance to interact (and make it fun). Dave's points and suggestions are quite general and I think they would apply to any public sector organisation trying to build interest and activity just as much as to political campaigners. In either case the underlying message is: if you want to get p...

posted in UK politics

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

U.S. follows UK lead on transparency!

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Ok. I am deliberately being a bit provocative, but its great to see a couple of US organisations creating a site called http://www.showusthedata.org/ where US citizens (and probably anybody) can suggest US federal data sets that should be publically available and people can vote on which ones they think would be most helpfully make public. So its a bit like showusabetterway but with a direct focus on data sets rather than interesting uses of data sets plus use of direct voting to highlight th...

posted in Obama Transparency US UK

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

UK Weather - Snow Problem for Twitter

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Great example of the power of crowd-sourcing. Last Sunday someone had the idea of using twitter to gather data on where it was snowing in the UK. So people who twitter were asked to send a message of the following kind: #uksnow tw12 5, i.e. the hashtag uksnow followed by the first three elements of their postcode followed by the amount of snow on a scale from 0-10. And then someone made a video of the result! Impressive and another good illustration of how things are going. For me info see h...

posted in twitter UK Collaboration

Bw_medium Tiago Peixoto

Vote for your Park: nothing but a bad idea?

last updated about 1 year ago, 12 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