What happens next is where YOU come in! The Aliss Project team are inviting people with long term conditions, service designers, product designers, graphic designers, marketers, funding bodies and business advisors to come together for two days and help make these ideas real!

FutureGov is working with colleagues Stephen Goldsmith and Zach Tumin at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to research the “now wave” and the “next wave” of service delivery around the world. We’d like your help. In the coming weeks, leaders of these efforts from five nations – Australia, the UK, the United States, New Zealand and Canada will be gathering in roundtable at Harvard to share current best practices and understand the prospects for the next wave of service reform. And we’d like to share your examples and thinking with them…

We seem to be in a run of telling you about new projects we’re involved in at the moment. This time round, we’re partnering with our associates Snook to work with the Scottish Government on their groundbreaking ALISS project. Here our project lead, Lauren Currie, tells more…

‘How do you know it works?’ is one of those annoying questions that people seem to ask about social media. For some reason they’re never satisfied with ‘it just does’ as an answer, so our next event is a dream-team partnership between FutureGov and Measurement Camp to get to the bottom of social media measurement.

My first blog of 2010 is to let you know about what is bound to be one of the big events of the year in the digital government world. I’ve been fortunate enough to be asked to be a part of the Programme Committee for the second installment of Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC, a much expanded, more diverse and more global committee compared to the 2009 edition.
If you are interested in sharing your Gov20/digital engagement story (read more about the event tracks here) the deadline for submissions is 6th January (ie THIS Wednesday - I know, sorry!) [read more]

I might have known Dominic would be responsible for the surprise email I got the other day asking me along to a blind date with the new data.gov.uk site. The data site is a place where all the government’s data sets will eventually live, accessible to developers and others who want to use the data, in standard formats. There are about 1100 data sets on there at the moment - not all of them are formatted for use (most of them are still in Excel spreadsheets or similar) but at this early stage about 20 data sets have been converted to useable formats…

The Conservative Party will launch later today their very own take on My.BarackObama.com (or MyBo for short), MyConservatives.com. Timed to be released ahead of next week’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, ‘MyCon’ (or even #MyCon, as it’s bound to become known on Twitter) provides a very British take on Barack Obama’s revolutionary approach to online campaigning and organising. Developed in conjunction with global digital media agency LBI, the Conservative Party will no doubt be hoping the site can achieve the same profile and uptake as its American counterpart, fêted as one of the driving forces behind Barack Obama’s historic win. Equally LBI will no doubt be looking to reach the legendary status of Blue State Digital, the people behind MyBO, in the new media world.

We are in the midst of a significant shift in the way we think about and relate to public services. Led both from inside government by the Prime Minister himself as well as more disruptive social, economic and technological change outside government, traditional delivery models and provider-client relationships are being challenged as never before. Driven in no small part by developments in the web, the speed and scale of change is happening on an unprecedented scale and leading us to question the notion of public services in our new, hyper-networked world.

We’re currently looking at the role of social media in recruitment - not only using the web to recruit, but also what we should expect candidates for public sector leadership roles to know about the world as a place where people are online and networked.

There are plenty who claim to know about the web because they’re on Facebook or someone they know is on Twitter, but how can we really test whether leaders (both current and prospective) embody the principles of networked working and the social web?

How can we know whether they truly understand the impact that the web has on public services? How do we tell whether they actually ‘get’ the big deal about social innovation? Is it even possible to test ’social web-ness’?

What would be the killer interview question to test the knowledge and commitment of someone who wants a leadership job in the public sector?

So we have just gone live with the FutureGov Nework social networking site! We have developed this site as a really straight forward, open and easy to use place to start to capture those things that we all do to improve public services - share stuff we’re all working on wherever we are, look at what other people are doing and, most importantly, talk.