http://www.artofgov.com Possibly one of the only CamelCase eGov WebLogs... Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:40:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's now all so predictable isn't? Yet another huge data loss, this time of the records of thousands of criminals. I pondered this yesterday as I went to the Post Office -or what's left of the Post Office - to pay my annual corporation tax bill. No doubt a big ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/08/23/pa-con-sulting/ It's very odd for people to use advanced digital technologies in order to write like a clerk from a Dickens novel. At last, something has been done. The IDeA (we won't comment on the aggravation of organisations using CamelCase - or blogs for that matter)...has published a website with a ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/08/20/capitalisation/ If you're allergic to public transport stories....look away now. The problem with having bus companies running railways is that there is no demarcation with 'competition'. Bus companies believe in buses first and foremost and therefore at the least excuse will substitute a bus for a train, regardless of the circumstances. A second ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/08/12/trainspotting/ Just starting a piece of work looking at vocabularies. Now here's a really interesting discovery I made this morning. There are certain councils that have marvellous reputations and are awarded gold stars from organisations such as the Audit Commission. I was eagerly awaiting my first visit to some of these websites ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/08/09/organising-knowledge/ Liz Orna also makes the point (in Information Strategy in Practice) that it's humans that create knowledge, not machines. And for knowledge production, the creation of new knowledge, the development of theories and ideas, do we need such high inputs of technology? Back to Darwin; a great many of his observations ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/07/25/creating-knowledge/ I hestitate to say much about whether the technology meltdown is still with me...some of it is; there has been a great deal of use of pencil and paper (I find at night these are much more ergonomic and satisfying tools to use; there is a more pleasant aesthetic in ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/07/24/technology-evolution-and-thinking/ Extraordinary week just gone for technical problems. Tuesday - laptop stops working - ie there's a light on but nobody in. No surprise there really as it's around five years old and has regularly been bashed into lampposts while in rucksack, or thrown onto floor of pub (not in aggressive way ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/07/10/technology-meltdown/ Good point - from Julie McLeod's excellent lecture at Northumbria University this evening. Julie asked a number of questions about photographs, our own family albums, our digital photos and whether we edit, save, organise them and add metadata. Of course we all do, to a lesser or greater extent. Which ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/07/03/we-are-all-records-managers/ Oh god, losing the will to live. I write 'north east london information sharing partnership' in the vain hope that someone who is responsible for this mysterious and elusive organisation will one day try and find out a bit more and type those words into an internet search engine. They ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/07/01/north-east-london-information-sharing-partnership/ I heard on the TV news this week that up to 8,000 may have died last year as a result of infections they picked up in hospitals. Amazing isn't it. Britain has the most expensive computerisation project in the world - and the highest incidence of deaths from hospital infections ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/18/dis-connecting-for-health/ Yes, our data is really safe in the hands of the buffons that inhabit the upper echelons of the civil service and parliament. I was going to write something about the loss of data about terrorist threats, followed the very next day by more top secret data loss, followed today ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/17/lost-papers-laptops/ Well, not that big. I dispute the billions of pages! I did two searches last week on the same day - and twice the top results were things I HAD WRITTEN. Quite frankly that's absurd as I don't write that much stuff. http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/12/how-big-is-the-internet/ Day two of watching football over the internet...no! no! no! - I mean, grafting away in the British Library. It's certainly an innovation watching Euro 2008 via the BBC website except...it's a bit like watching animated 'painting by numbers'. This may just be a glitch in the British Library set ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/10/resolution/ When whiling away the hours in the British Library, I often make use of one of their computers for internet access while I use the laptop for writing on. It saves all that toggling from one screen to another that I can never get to grips with. Totally by accident, ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/09/finally-the-british-library-does-good/ I can never remember either. Particularly not 'memorable name'. My brain just doesn't work that way. So I find myself increasingly resorting to writing letters to people and using snail mail. Have spend 30 minutes trying to remember my password for the Wine Society. I can't, so I've filled in ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/08/739/ Here's a puzzler; the merging, separation, difference between the world of one's work and professional life and the world of one's leisure and private life. The development of the web, and this addictive obsession people have of social networking (they don't need any extra advertising here), blogging and the trail ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/06/internet-presence/ Spent the day at an excellent RMS North group meeting. Six presentations. Five were very good. The sixth? Well, anyone who was there will be aware of the extraordinary events that occured when the speaker stopped. I can't say more as there seemed to be suggestions of legal action. http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/05/rms-north-meeting/ There's a great track on the new Chumbawamba album (?album? CD? download tracks...zzzzzzzzzzzzz ) - whatever; called 'Add Me' - about internet creeps. In fact the whole 25 songs are great. http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/04/add-me/ Slowly discovering the Lit & Phil in Newcastle. Here again, is a *proper* library. The only other I've found recently is the Bishopgate's Institute in London. The Lit & Phil has the primary function of encouraging people to read books. No gimmicks, no internet (that I saw). Whole shelves of histories ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/03/lit-phil-tea-and-biscuits/ Just back from a week cycling in France. Fantastic. Although I couldn't get the television to work in the place we stayed. It was the two remote controls and the digi-box wot confused me. When I did eventually manage to make it work (after half an hour) it seemed to ... http://www.artofgov.com/2008/06/02/recursive-searching/