I’ve been sifting through a few papers on localism including the Communities and Local Government (CLG) guide to Decentralisation and the Localism Bill, the LG Group briefing and some internal papers which interpret the much awaited Localism Bill. Broadly speaking, Localism proposes a shift in power from central government, to local communities through the ‘de-centralisation’ of services. By way of some background, it is helpful to read the Conservatives green paper on Localism. I’m currently working on [...]

I’ve been a bit slow off the mark to read Martha Lane Fox’s review of Directgov and recommendations for government digital services. The review is centred around the principle that the UK Government needs to adopt a service led culture to delivering public services online. Whilst this report is not a policy or an implementation plan it does represent an important milestone for Government webbies, in particular those who champion user experience. I know DirectGov [...]

Following the Spending Review, significant spending cuts are becoming a reality for many public services. The issue of how to engage citizens in budget consultations to define local priorities is becoming all the more important. Redbridge have re-launched their YouChoose application for 2010, which allows residents to balance a complex budget using an interactive tool. The tool reveals consequences of your budget choices as you change the sliders to reduce the budget in different areas. There [...]

I had a quick look at the Apps for Good blog this evening and found myself getting totally absorbed. I was blown away by the quality of presentations and design concepts which are emerging from this excellent programme. Great stuff! In particular I was interested in how they have been using Google’s App Inventor, a visual programming tool which enables people to easily create smart phone apps. At the moment Google are only providing access [...]

Ever wondered what’s topics are hot in the UX community? What design problems are those clever UX types spending all their time on? The UX Zeitgeist from leading UX publishers Rosenfeld Media pulls together UX topics, books and people and ranks them based on the number of times they are mentioned in blogs, reviews and other places across the web as well, as well as in UX books. The UX Zeitgeist also allows users from [...]

Although I’ve been involved in the design, development and evaluation of websites for many years, one area that is relatively new to me is content strategy and management. A few months ago I took over a team that supports a fairly large team of content authors (up to 300, with around 80 or so regular authors) who publish content on our corporate website and intranet. I’ve spent a little while finding out more about our [...]

On Tuesday 9 November at 10:00 am I’m speaking at the Local by Social online conference. If you haven’t already come across it the conference is a brilliantly organised online event run by Ingrid Koehler and colleagues at Local Government Improvement & Development. The aim of the conference is to discuss: Using social media to improve engagement between councils and citizens Practitioners: creating and sharing knowledge online Exploring Open data for improvement and innovation I’ve [...]

Paul Henderson has written an insightful post about the use of one of my fave bits of social media technology (aka WordPress) in our Fenland Social Media project. Paul runs through the reasons why we chose WordPress for the project, what plugins were used and how they were implemented. Early on in the project, it was identified that in order to keep barriers to access as low as possible, we did not want residents to have [...]

Just a quick post about the Customer Insight in Public Services conference that I attended today. I was speaking about a partnership social media project in Wisbech, which was funded by Communities and Local Government. There were some really useful presentations. One that stood out for me was the work Lewisham Council had been doing, using customer insight techniques to drive improvements to public services. A variety of case studies were presented and some of the [...]

I mentioned in an earlier post a project I’ve been involved with in Cambridgeshire. Over the Summer we’ve been trialling ShapeYourPlace.org in Wisbech and the surrounding villages. It’s a community website where residents can raise issues and suggest ideas and local service providers respond. The site also pulls in feeds from other useful sources such as neighbourhood policing team details and meetings and community events and activities from Cambridgeshire.net. I’ve been working closely with the exceedingly patient [...]