Archive for the 'leadership' Category

Downing Tweet: is this about the personal, celebrity or patronage?

Friday, March 28th, 2008 | 12 Comments »

There has been a lot of interest in Downing Street joining Twitter. But does it really mean much, or anything, that’s new?

At the moment number 10 is using it predominantly as a means to feed us links to press releases plus the odd Youtube film. Very good.

Within less than 24 hours 178 people [...]

Does government have ears enough?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

It is becoming downright tricky for the government to get our attention. Not for the old reasons of being mostly boring. Rather because our attention is increasingly elsewhere – immersed more and more in networks and relationships.

What I pay heed to is much more self indulgent now than it was 15 years ago. [...]

Is Tom Watson MP stealing or reading? The Tories think the former.

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | 24 Comments »

I received an e-mail today from the office of George Osbourne the Shadow Chancellor. Thanks to Rohan Silva for getting in touch.

They wanted to point out similarities between the speech Tom Watson made yesterday on The Power of Information and previous speeches and announcements made by the Conservative Party. The body [...]

Funding for Social Entrepreneurs in Journalism

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Teaming up with the Knight Foundation, Ashoka announced that they will award fellowships to 30 social entrepreneurs over the next three years aimed at changing the way journalism works throughout the world.
These Fellows will receive three-year stipends allowing them to focus full-time on their efforts to provide lasting, visible, systemic change in the way journalism [...]

Why should leaders blog?

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | 15 Comments »

That’s the question thrown my way by Simon Peters at Common Purpose as this international leadership charity sets out to start it’s own blogging experiment. So why?

Leaders need followers and followers need to know if they can trust you.

A blog helps establish how trustworthy you are. It is a patient process, but, over time, [...]

We-Think by Charles Leadbeater. A review

Monday, March 3rd, 2008 | 3 Comments »

About the time I start writing this a bunch of people will be gathering in London to launch We-Think (Amazon link), the book written by Charles Leadbeater and 237 others. I was sent a review copy, partly because I left a single comment on the wiki, which was used to turn his solo first [...]

David Cameron, Tom Steinberg and Information Scraping

Saturday, March 1st, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Has David Cameron been talking to Tom Steinberg at MySociety?  His announcement yesterday suggests he has because he wants to make ‘scraping’ easier.  Scraping is the process of harvesting information from government websites and reusing it – hopefully for public good.

The Conservative leader quoted a really good example with the mysociety website theyworkforyou which provides [...]

The user is the content.

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

You may have heard me before railing at the term user generated content. It infuriates me because it embodies two ideas: “you mean we can get them to make films for us for free?” and “Well yes they can use our space but only when and how it suits us”.
It begins with the assumption [...]