Digital by Default

Digital by Default

Show your workings: a digital statistical publication

Russell has written a post that touches on some of his thinking about what a ‘digital white paper’ might look like and in doing so draws attention to Bret Victor’s tour de force of a ‘longread’ about climate change. The real brilliance of the work by Victor is that not only is it wonderfully interactive…

November 29, 2015
A hobbyist hacker, spreadsheet warrior & an API advocate walked in to a pub…

..and they all tell the bar staff they can’t pour a pint. That is basically the life of being a data publisher at the moment. Leigh has written a great post about ‘Who is the intended audience for open data?’ where he articulates some of the problems and clashes of cultures better than I could…

November 29, 2015
Going viral: the digitalisation of our iconic institutions

Like most people of a certain vintage in a digital-ish profession I went through a stage where Techcrunch was my bible and I desperately wanted to be a part of a successful startup. In the end I spent a year at a [not] successful example and learned loads — not least that it wasn’t the world for…

November 20, 2015
What If…? The proposed ‘Office for Students’ was treated like a start-up* from day one

Last week the ‘Higher Education Green Paper’ was released for consultation. You can read a useful summary over on Times Higher and a whole bunch of useful analysis at WonkHE (with my former colleague David Kernohan contributing some great stuff.) Now I don’t really have anything to say about the paper itself (other than the…

November 8, 2015
The Book of GDS (and beyond)

A couple of tweets this week led to me buying ‘The Book of OpenStreetmap’ — a collection of interviews from founding contributors to OSM by the original founder Steve Coast. It is an interesting read but I found it even more interesting for reasons outside of the content. I really want to write a book. Not for…

November 8, 2015