A few years ago I met a really successful entrepreneur who told me that 80% of his time was spent looking for the right people – once he had them then all that was needed was to point them in the right direction. I have never been quite sure of the 80% but I do …
A lot of my thinking about place has been shaped by social geographers like Doreen Massey or more recently by economic thinking about how to drive place based growth. In considering how to build digital civic infrastructure I leaned heavily into the idea of a story of place and the need to find or create …
The image is of the democracy stack – you can have a read about this here Nothing I have seen in the last week or so has made me any less of the belief that the slow death of the current political party machinery is bringing our democracy down with it. Have we not yet run …
What if we defined the purpose of digital public services as being to build a more participative relationship with the public? If we are seeing the emergence of the network society then don’t we have to? One of the reasons I believe that you can’t design an effective digital strategy without thinking about 21st century citizens and …
If libraries are some of the best examples of civic space which we have then is your library card a potential route to democratic participation? I spent last Saturday with the Association of Senior Childrens and Educational librarians at their annual conference. I was speaking about libraries as digital civic spaces and I wanted to …
I have a long running sofa argument with my husband about the fact that he believes that at some point soon the googleplex (the Howe domestic shortcode for machine based decision making in the cloud) will take over the business of government and that messy old democracy will fall by the wayside. I disagree (hence …
This post is really just a sketch of something I have been calling the democracy stack. The idea behind the democracy stack is a believe that representative democracy needs to be seen as just one part of a democratic system and that participatory and deliberative ‘layers’ are also needed. The diagram above is an attempt to …
A couple of weeks ago I was at the Society of Chief Librarians annual conference and I spoke about digital leadership and the need to create digital civic space. It was an excellent conference with a really interesting group of people and the session has stayed with me so I wanted to reflect on some of …
Image: Highline park in New York I am spending the day (and probably the week) wrestling with edits on the NHS Citizen technology paper. I will write up a summary of the feedback for the NHS Citizen website but the combination of this as well as a number of related conversations recently motivated me to …
This post was inspired by Andrea Siodmok, Anthony Zach and my friend Meriel – each of whom in their own way pushed me over the edge (in a good way) to actually submit the corrections to my thesis rather than hoarding them gollam-like and simply muttering “my precious my precious” in my study. Thanks folks …