Nick Booth › Comments

Really good comment from Neil on Dave Brigg post about the problem of us not blogging enough good stuff. Like Steph, my own experience of blogging about my work within Whitehall over the last year and a bit has been that it is *really* difficult. Lack of time is the biggest barrier due both to having a young family and the day job spilling over into evenings and weekends. But this is closely followed by issues around permission and propriety. I’ve felt that I’ve had to restrict what I share and write about more, not less, as time has gone on. Which is a real pity – because writing about this stuff online gets me a lot of useful feedback, helps me make contacts which are useful to my employer, makes me reflect more deeply on the value of what I’m doing – ultimately helps motivate me to do the best I can. If it was easier, if I felt safer, if it were encouraged, I’d do it a lot more." - Nick Booth

A really simple idea to collate a range of film resources - in this case on drug and alcohol abuse - Nick Booth

"Spent most of the journey doing a small social media surgery on the train. At least one more person blogging :-)" - Nick Booth

".... a new service: bit.ly Pro. The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites" - Nick Booth

"we used the technique that powers KittenWar.com to help decide our key strategic priorities for the next year: after all , if we don’t, who will?" - Nick Booth

"OK most of government isn't as sexy as (m)any of these brands, but we thought it might give you some inspiration when looking at how to build your Facebook page." - Nick Booth

"2010 will not be the year of hyperlocal—these are the foothills, the beginnings of localised online publishing. But the signs are auspicious: increasing levels of online literacy and broadband connections mixed with more inevitable local newspaper closures mean it's natural that readers—and advertisers—will shift to new outlets. Whether anyone will be making a real living from it—as a mainstream publisher or a start-up—seems unlikely in the near future… " via @daveharte - Nick Booth

"Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city's IT budget." via @davebriggs - Nick Booth

Andy Sheppard, neighbourhod manager, shows that praise is a key quality to deploy in blogging a community: "Father Christmas made a special visit to Stanhope Hall and presented all the children with an early Christmas Present. Special thanks for both events are due to Monica Lee Community Worker and the ladies of Stanhope Hall Womens Group who worked incredibly hard to ensure the success of both events. Special thanks are also due to Eddie Howard and Highgate Housing Liaison Board for their support for both events." - Nick Booth

Stan's Cafe theatre pledge encourages people to make a commitment to support local theatre, bring new people to new experiences. What might you choose to create a pledge for? - Nick Booth

My favourite Birmingham charity on how you can support it with your Christmas Shopping - Nick Booth

"What followed was a sequence of graphics that map the course of human relations in the film - cutely assuming that love relationships are "dynamic" (don't stop reading) and ignore scuzzy soap and socks left on the floor." - Nick Booth

Well worth a read: "An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We're seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels." - Nick Booth

There have been some pretty exciting announcements during the last few weeks. Alongside those, we’ve also met with the Royal Mail to have a talk about finding a way forward. A couple of weeks ago, we had a great meeting with the Royal Mail. They explained in some detail the background to these datasets: how they’re maintained, where the data comes from and where money changes hands. It’s all a bit complicated! - Nick Booth

I keep returning to this post by Headshift’s Lee Bryant, on leadership in the networked society. It’s big, meaty and good. My starting point was the myth that leadership is somehow less important in new, networked organisations. Not so. If anything, it is more important than ever, but the focus and practice of leadership is changing; and if we are to engage leaders and involve them in the development of social business structures, then we need to be able to understand and address their challenges and issues using language that resonates with them. He provides some slides from a talk he recently gave on the topic, which give a nice overview – though I really do recommend you read – and re-read – the whole thing: - Nick Booth

"The Government will encourage local government to release local public data and make it free for reuse, and establish an open-platform local data exchange. Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton has been asked to head up a panel of experts to oversee the release of local public data and ensure that data are linked effectively across local authorities, the Local Government Association, government departments and agencies." - Nick Booth

Internal social network for companies. - Nick Booth

If knowledge really is power then we’re truly putting an awful lot of power into the hands of the ordinary citizen. The person who uses and pays for public services. In times of extraordinary pressure on public finances this seems absolutely the right thing to be doing. - Nick Booth

"Recently, I’ve been working with colleagues in COI on this problem and we’ve come up with three common measures that appear to work across all digital engagement or social media tools: 1. Number of relationships 2. Number of user-generated content items 3. Number of referrals/recommendations" - Nick Booth

"Residents in Longton and Meir are invited to meet their local police commander next week, and a new billboard will leave them in no doubt of where and when to find him. A 20ft by 10ft billboard has been sited on Weston Road in Meir (near The Broadway) inviting people to come and speak to the local commander. " via @Mike_rawlins - Nick Booth

What a relief: "In a recent Polis private seminar with a major international NGO and a global news organisation, the head of the news media’s international division said that he now accepted that they had to work together to report the world: “We may have, if we are lucky, one stringer in a particular country. You may well have a dozen people there who know it well. It makes sense for us to use your resources to cover a story or issue.” All media organisations are now opening themselves up to gathering material from the public - including NGOs. And NGOs are now expecting their humanitarian staff to act more like journalists. " - Nick Booth

"In Leicestershire 92 council staff spend their time keeping government up to date on 3,000 performance indicators at a cost of £7 million a year. The need to reduce these costs, and shift the emphasis of performance reporting from central government to local people, sit at the heart of the LGA campaign Freedom to Lead." - Nick Booth

Hear, hear: " What struck me last night, and not for the first time, was that people still have this ingrained view of what a blog is. When I showed the cake site to one lady she blurted out, “That’s not a blog! A blog is boring with lots of text.” Wordpress.com still promotes itself to bloggers and offers: “Express yourself. Start a blog.” It’s a website that is easy to update and optimised for search engines. End of. Let’s not label it with something that puts people off. - Nick Booth

Pledges to support local theatre/culture. Could they be adapted to strengthen local community? "# Attend 12 theatre shows in the next 12 months, 4 by West Midlands writers/artists/companies you haven’t seen before, 1 in a West Midlands Venue you’ve never been to before. # Take 12 people who have never been, rarely go, or don’t ‘do’ Independent Theatre to a show. Share transport. # Host a meal/party for 8 people 4 of which you barely know. # Write 12 comments/reviews/blog entries about theatre on other people’s sites. # Attend 1 mid*point or return to the next Open Space event." - Nick Booth

How did it stop being like this? "In West Midlands Police we have been one of the pilot forces for ‘community resolutions’. This effectively allows officers to use their judgement to make decisions at the scene of some lower level crimes, and together with the victim agree on a suitable remedy. So if a gang of kids break your window, you can ask them to apologise and pay for it, rather than enter into the criminal justice system. So far we have carried out 8000 of these types of resolutions, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Police officers are allowed to use their professional judgement (or common sense as it is more commonly known,) based on the full circumstances of the case, not on narrow performance objectives." - Nick Booth

This is blogging to warm the cockles of my heart: "My wife likes Bahlsen's Choco Leibniz biscuits, so we often have some in the pantry. But their presence weighs heavy on my pedantic mind. There it is, in my home, the yellow box with its (in)famous slogan: More chocolate than a biscuit Eh? It should be "More chocolate than biscuit"! (They're about two-thirds choc.) I can only imagine that this slogan was the victim of hypercorrection in the seminar room" - Nick Booth

"It reminded me of a hypothetical situation someone put to me the other day: You are the editor of a newspaper. You are allowed to employ one more person. You can choose either a writer that has won a Pulitzer prize or a writer that has built an online community of 40,000 highly committed readers and contributors. Which do you choose? I know nothing is ever that clear cut, of course. This is a real “daddy or chips” question. Yet, I guess how you answer it gives a good indication of how you think we should train our journalists of the future." I'd choose both. - Nick Booth

"The guide takes absolute beginners to Twitter right from the start – explaining what Twitter is, and how to sign up – right through to replying, retweeting, hashtagging and using tools to measure success." Dave Briggs knows his stuff - and he can be funny. - Nick Booth

The 'Open100' competition is a celebration of the power of openness and mass collaboration. You can be part of the competition by nominating the company you think is the best open innovator. The competition will be open until 12th February while the winners will be announced on 24thFebruary. The winners are those who will be included in the list of the world's top 100 open companies - Nick Booth

The 'Open100' competition is a celebration of the power of openness and mass collaboration. You can be part of the competition by nominating the company you think is the best open innovator. The competition will be open until 12th February while the winners will be announced on 24thFebruary. The winners are those who will be included in the list of the world's top 100 open companies - Nick Booth