Digital by Default

Category: work

  • Exciting times…new opportunities.

    Exciting times…new opportunities.

    It is an exciting time to be working in digital Government. The influence of GDS can increasingly be seen worldwide and closer to home centres of excellence are moving beyond Holborn to Newcastle, Swansea and beyond. In the UK Paul Shetler, CDO at the Ministry of Justice, wrote eloquently about why this work is so…

  • Rules of Engagement

    I’m working on a pretty big project at the moment – it is still relatively early days but I can already see it has the capacity to become pretty all consuming. This is a draft of some ideas I have for some ‘principles’ for the project – I don’t think there is anything controversial or…

  • Trying something new for 30 days

    One of the things we tried as part of out in-house ‘digital festival’ was a daily ‘digital cinema’. Basically we booked out our meeting room, supplied popcorn and showed a couple of interesting videos from around the web to whoever showed up. To be honest it wasn’t a resounding success (unlike the rest of the…

  • Buzzfeedification

    I’m not going to lie until very recently I was pretty dismissive of Buzzfeed and its peers. I saw it is as dumbing down online news and playing in to the hands of all those critics who say the web trivialises issues. Also as someone who has zero empathy for animals the kitten stuff didn’t…

  • Social Media Principles in Practice

    I’ve been a reasonably heavy user of social media pretty much from day one. I was an early advocate of using it as a comms channel, in the workplace and have written various guidelines, policies and strategies about how best to make use of it. The funny thing is that over the years I have…