Knowledge is now the property of the network. The smartest person in the room is the room itself.
David Weinberger in Too Big to Know
Can’t believe this hadn’t come to my attention before. Great idea.
What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That’s precisely the premise of advice to sink in slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters — part Live Now, part Everything Is Going To Be OK, part Wisdom, part something completely refreshing, based on the idea that we all have subjective wisdom we wish we’d known earlier, but often don’t get a chance to pass it on to those who can benefit from it in a way that makes them pay heed.
You can also buy fundraising posters, 100% of the proceeds going to fund free posters for first years. Do it!
A talk by Nicholas Felton (he of Feltron Annual Report & Facebook Timeline fame) entitled Numerical Narratives (recorded at Eyeo Festival 2011).
Incidentally, if you’re wondering when the 2011 Annual Report is out…
@inorganik if all goes well, it’ll be out by the end of the month.
— Nicholas Felton (@feltron) January 3, 2012
These are particles with a will
Dirk Helbing on Pedestrians.
IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?
The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why.
The Size (reposted from faststream.hmg.gov.uk)
Before I joined Poke, I spent a couple of years in the UK Civil Service as one of the first few people to join via the Technology in Business Fast Stream, launched a few years ago to plug the (then widening) digital skills gap in Government. When I was asked by the Cabinet Office to write about some of my experiences last year, I put together the post below, which was published last May.
While I enjoyed the time I spent in Whitehall, and feel like we made a lot of progress in the short time I was at HMRC, there were a few of us who felt constrained by the technological limitations that come from working in the Public Sector (my main bugbear being having to use IE6…), and who have taken since swapped Whitehall for Tech City Silicon Roundabout.
The Fast Stream team have recently removed all posts by those of us who have recently moved on - they’ve made some positive first steps onto Facebook, but still don’t quite get the idea of blogging…
I’ve therefore reposted the article below (and added back in the links), which hopefully will be of use to those out there who are looking to apply to TiB.
How Big…?
One thing that hits you when you first start working in central government is the sheer scale of operations, particularly if you working for one of the larger Departments. The numbers at HMRC tell the story (up to a point): £435.1bn of tax collected, £39bn in benefits and tax credits paid out, 61 million calls handled via Contact Centres, three million visits to our Enquiry Centres, 9.9 million letters received (these numbers are for 2009/10).
How about our website? Towards the end of January when people file their tax return online, it becomes the third busiest in the world, beaten only by Facebook and Google. You don’t need much imagination to understand how integral ICT is to delivering these numbers, but it takes a surprising amount of creativity and ingenuity to understand how to meet the challenges we now face.
UK consumers are more likely to access social networking sites on a mobile phone than other countries, with 43 per cent of those with social networking site profiles saying they do so compared to just 30 per cent in the US.
From Ofcom’s International Communications Report 2011, up from 24% in 2010 (US was 22% last year).
Also of interest:
- In the UK, twice as many people claim to have a Friends Reunited profile as a MySpace one (sorry Tom/Rupert)
- Mobile access to Social Networks will likely overtake Desktop access in 2012 in the UK (but not Laptop access)
Really nice themed interview series by Interactive Things. In their own words:
We want to feel the pulse of the creative community working at the intersection of art, design, and science. They are restlessly weaving together the physical with the digital, turning data into meaning, and creating interactive experiences to generate inspiring insights that encourage us to challenge our own works.
How many times can one man say “unacceptable”? :)
“Last Thursday, Chris Chant gave a talk at a cloud-computing event kindly hosted by the Institute for Government in London. Chris is an Executive Director in the Cabinet Office working as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, and spoke about G-Cloud and what people can expect from it. For those who were unable to make the event, we recorded it and present it here.”
They fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today.
On large companies - George W. Buckley, CEO of 3M.
[via Public Strategist]
I’m interested in the solved problem. I’m interested in high art and real science.
