Digital by Default

January 19, 2016

Farewell old friends (reunited)

So Friends Reunited is closing down. Really did anyone really know it was still going? It had long since been superseded in the public consciousness by Facebook — hell probably even by Peach. I remember happier times for the Friends though. At the turn of the naughties before social media was anything more than a twinkle in…

January 13, 2016

More Tigger than Tiger

Andrew Greenway has written an interesting post in defence of the ‘senior civil service’. I don’t have much to say directly about what he has written — my experience with the SCS is primarily limited to those I know at ONS and a few I’ve known and know at GDS. Even with that narrow a perspective I…

January 9, 2016

Innovate or sigh: are ‘labs’ helpful?

The ONS was in the news again recently and while the website got away unscathed for a change it didn’t make for comfortable reading. The criticism from Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Treasury select committee, follows on from the initial findings of the Bean Review into Economic Statistics which while even handed was itself…

January 7, 2016

The Hello, World! of open data development

As part of the Bristol is Open initiative the Council has released an API providing access to all manner of local transport data including live bus times. Given the complexity of the public transport environment in the city this is no mean feat and the team should be applauded. The thing is though does the…

January 6, 2016

Premature exasperation

The last 48 hours my Twitter stream has been all a flutter about two things — the expansion of Twitter character limit to 10,000 which is significant inflation from the existing 140 and the next iPhone replacing the standard headphone something with some thing more Apple shaped and non-standard. Honestly I’m not much of a fan of…