Developing policy advice on new technology & tools for the Community Empowerment Strategy Division of CLG

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Welcome to the workbench

Mon, 05/12/2008 - 19:23 — Simon Berry

A workshop session at Shine 2008During this 3-month secondment to CLG it would be so easy to get engulfed by the government machine and become invisible to the very people that I need to help me from both inside and outside government.

So I intend to use this online place as my workbench, or should I say, our workbench. Subject, of course, to not embarassing anyone or breaking the Official Secrets Act.

I'm going into this secondment with no preconceptions, except one, and that is that anything the government does should build on what's already there . . . existing initiatives, services, ideas, opinions, knowledge and people doing good things. And it follows therefore that any policy advice I develop should be done in the same way. I want to draw out the genius that is in the network for the benefit of everyone.

I'll be keeping a diary here and I hope others will too. I need your insights, case studies, opinions etc. I'll also be aggregating anything tagged web24gov (#web24gov for Twitter users) so please start tagging now! I want everything, del.icio.us bookmarks, blog posts, podcasts, video, tweets, the lot.

Here's how to get involved.

And, thanks in anticipation!

Simon

Comments

Tue, 05/27/2008 - 06:29 — Anonymous

Help

Simon

Good to see you are settling in

Web 2.0 - the people at mysociety do things a lot quicker and better than any government widget.

Have you compared directgov searches with directionless gov searches yet ?

Have you seen Ideal Government site ? It always seems to carry the right challenges if you google it

Jake Chapman, John Seddon and others have been trying to impress lean and systems thinking on government for some time. They have had a few successes like your Tameside example, but precious few

Any reasons - vested interests possibly ; time to change the direction of a very large organisation

Web 2.0 and widgets - this might be a win ; the whitehall webbies can presumably help you there

Did you ever read civil serf blog ? That told you why things would be hard

Coca Cola for government like your idea in personal life - do you ever see the government going on R4 like their corporate affairs person ?

Try an analogy and maybe we can help to see a change through in 3 months

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