Digital by Default

February 27, 2015

February [month note]

February has been the classic ‘game of two halves’. Basically before and after we started the Beta in earnest. The first week was dominated by a trip up to Durham for a really interesting and useful meeting with the team at Nomis – one of the ONS satellite sites that supports ‘small area data’ (which…

February 17, 2015

My Ambitions for the Beta

The development team is in the building and the tip tapping of coding on custom keyboards fills the air so it is about time I tried to articulate some personal ambitions for this project. [These aren’t necessarily the corporate objectives – though there is some cross over and clearly our commitment to ‘user driven development’…

February 14, 2015

My SXSW Schedule [Beta]

I have no idea if there is any point to this as I’ve never been to SXSW and to be honest it all sounds pretty intimidating. I have no clue how long it takes to get from one venue to another or just how many sessions it is sensible to try and take in on…

February 14, 2015

Remote working (a clarification)

I think I have come across a little more negative about the concept of remote working than I intended in my earlier post. Actually I am entirely supportive of the idea and know organisations like Mozilla, Automattic, Open Knowledge, 37 Signals and many many others make it work brilliantly. Hell even JISC made a pretty…

February 13, 2015

People. Problems. Perspectives.

I’m still thinking about the whole people conundrum at the heart of the agile, digital development approach we are taking. My consistent online whingeing has certainly identified that it isn’t an uncommon problem and it isn’t just the public sector facing it. There is clearly a something of a ‘talent shortage’ and the traditional brain…