This is the text of a speech I gave at a dinner at a digital policing conference. It is not verbatim as I never read stuff out and my ipad died 5 mins in but its basically what I covered. I wanted to post it as its reflects some of my current grinding anxiety that …
We are digging ourselves a hole. In a complicated world communication is everything. Much of this complication is caused by our own laziness and carelessness with language – we appropriate and borrow words without ever taking the time to work out what they really mean. In our yearning to make ourselves understood we dilute our …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I wanted to do a quick capture of my thoughts about #PDDigital15 on Thursday – it was such a brilliant event I wanted to reflect on what made it so good. Here are some thoughts: Collaborative leadership: The event wouldn’t have happened without the amazing Victoria Betton but she is very clear that she didn’t do it …
This is part of a bigger project that Solace are looking at around a policy landscape for local government on the digital agenda (hopefully covering all 7 tribes of digital!!!). I’ve been asked to sketch out the critical questions and issues that I see under the broad heading of digital by design. Hopefully colleagues working …
This is my half of a conversation that @Sarahlay and I had at @Localgovcamp. She has written an excellent piece about it here which you should probably read first. Its also the next post in my thinking around networked or digital leadership which you can read about here. Sarah and I were jointly frustrated by …