Simon blogs about e-government, online news and politics.
Some important people read it. Here's his latest stuff.
Yes you can change your Twitter ID. Don’t.
A while back, Mark Pack wrote a couple of articles noting that if MPs were worried about breaking election campaign rules by running a Twitter account with the letters MP in it, they probably needn't be. The authorities tended to be 'sensibly flexible'; and besides, it was dead easy to change your Twitter account name. [...] read on »
Berners-Lee, Bin Laden and business logic
Watching BBC2's The Virtual Revolution at the weekend, I found myself drawing an unexpected and slightly uncomfortable parallel. Entitled Enemy Of The State?, this week's installment looked at social networks and political activism - touching, as you'd expect, on Twitter during the Iranian election, the great firewall of China, Islamic fundamentalism and the Estonian cyber-attack. All [...] read on »
Payment on results
WeAreSocial's Robin Grant tagged me (and various others) on Twitter, asking for opinions on Conservative proposals from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne: A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency [...] read on »
Captcha yourself on
There's always a risk attached to using automated text-generating services. For example, this 'captcha' I was presented with by the Conservatives' Blue Blog website: Not one to raise on the first trip to Camp David, perhaps. read on »
Defence green paper on WordPress
Delighted to note the Ministry of Defence's decision to publish its new green paper in commentable form, using a restyled version of Steph's Commentariat theme for WordPress. The MoD have been doing some excellent, if a little underpublicised, work with blogging tools - Defence News and a blog from Afghanistan, both running on a Typepad account; [...] read on »
French military’s open-source collaboration
Now this is how open source is meant to work. In January 2007, the French defence ministry's Direction Générale de l'Armement began work (in association with BT) on a project called Milimail, to enhance Firefox's open-source cousin, the Thunderbird email client for military purposes. It's now known as Trustedbird - and lists among its additional features: Deletion [...] read on »
No10 e-petition on abandoning IE6
I've happily signed the e-petition on the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to 'encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6.' I've written on this subject before; and I know the huge headache it would be to alter in-house applications built for IE6 alone (although that's another story altogether). I note the [...] read on »
Don’t go comparing
There's a bit of a spat at the moment over Conservative (mis)use of crime stats to suggest a doubling or trebling of violent crime. The BBC's Mark Easton has an excellent summary of the situation, which ultimately boils down to a change in how the numbers were put together: Before 2002 the decision as to whether [...] read on »
WordPress in your pocket
The trinity is complete: with the release of an officially-sponsored Android app, following in the footsteps of previous iPhone and BlackBerry releases, there's now a WordPress client for the three biggest-hitting smartphone platforms. (Sorry Nokia.) It's development like this which, in my mind, lifts WordPress above other similar platforms - and any bespoke CMS build. You've [...] read on »
Government beefs up open source policy – a bit
A bit out of the blue, this morning saw a revision of the UK government's open source policy. And whilst it still doesn't quite endorse the notion that open source solutions are fundamentally better solutions, it does ratchet up the expectations. Last year's revision to the 2005 policy statement introduced a subtle - but, I thought, [...] read on »
Sites and projects we've worked on:
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Lynne Featherstone MP
Her old website was so outdated, it was almost charming. We migrated 6 years of content over to WordPress, with some groundbreaking presentation ideas; blogger Iain Dale called it one of the best political websites he'd ever seen.
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Wales Office
They started with the ugliest website in Whitehall, and no hands-on control of content. We gave them a little gem of a site, with full control in the press officers' hands, and features most Whitehall departments still can't match.
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DFID Bloggers
Perhaps our finest hour so far: a platform for staff of the Department for International Development to tell their stories from the front line. Lots of cool functionality, much of it behind the scenes, but it's the stories it features which make this site so great.
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10 Downing Street
We helped the Prime Minister's Office in their landmark move to WordPress; and we're happy to offer occasional advice on various aspects of digital comms.
PM's travel blogs: US, Brussels, Japan
Progressive Governance summit » -
WordCamp UK
We were proud to sponsor the first gathering of UK WordPress developers and devotees in 2008, and its even bigger and better successor in 2009.
About
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Meet Simon
Simon Dickson was the UK civil service's first web specialist, and has won several national and international awards for his work in government and media circles.
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The mission
Small, fast, innovative, cheap. Having seen both sides, we believe it's the only way to make good things happen in government.
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We ♥ WordPress
We didn't start out with the intention of being a WordPress specialist; but it's such a perfect fit for almost everything we do. Here's our 10-point guide as to why.