Puffbox.com

Adventures in government, politics and open source. Mostly WordPress-related.

Simon Dickson, principal consultant at Puffbox, has been blogging about e-government, online politics, and WordPress since 2005. Some important people read it.

Archive for January 2009

Meet the new Puffbox.com

30 January 2009 10

If you're reading this on the website rather than the RSS feed, you'll already have noticed things look a bit different. It's a new year, Barcamp is around the corner, and it's high time for a design refresh of the company website. Of course, it's still a custom WordPress theme; and everything's more or less [...] read on »

All the LibDem news you can consume

30 January 2009 0

I've often written in glowing terms about the Liberal Democrats' approach to the web; for a good few years now, they've been doing some remarkably innovative stuff which, for whatever reason, was always overlooked. So it was a real pleasure recently to meet the party's wonderfully-titled Head of Innovations, Mark Pack; and it led to [...] read on »

DFID's new group blog function

30 January 2009 4 , ,

We rolled out a fairly modest enhancement to the DFID Bloggers website this week: probably unnoticed by most users, but one I'm quite proud of. At its heart, the DFID site is a group blog; but we do a few things to present it as a network of individual blogs by individual bloggers. Then the [...] read on »

Lords say little about online comms

26 January 2009 1

There's something thoroughly disappointing about the House of Lords Communications Committee's report on government communication, published today. There's nothing inherently wrong in the conclusions it reaches, but with the greatest respect to Their Lordships, this same report could have been written a decade ago. Online communication gets little more than a passing mention, and even [...] read on »

No10 leaps into Twitter's top 100

24 January 2009 4 , ,

One of the biggest successes in e-government this past year, and arguably one of the most surprising, is Downing Street's use of Twitter. And thanks to a remarkable couple of weeks, the Prime Minister's Office now finds itself in the Top 100 of the most followed Twitter accounts worldwide, as ranked (fairly reliably) by Twitterholic.com. [...] read on »

COI browser guidelines: consultation works!

23 January 2009 1 , ,

The final version of COI's browser testing guidelines have emerged, and it's simply wonderful to see a shorter, tighter, more standards-centric document than the draft I reviewed back in September. In fact, looking down my bullet-list of specific recommended changes, all of them seem to have gone into the final document. Cool. The revised document [...] read on »

The Obama memoranda

22 January 2009 4 , ,

It's well worth reading the two memoranda issued by President Obama yesterday, on - ironically, given yesterday's events - FOI and transparency. There's nothing about them on the White House website (???), so I'm grateful to this Washington Post blog. On Freedom of Information: In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages [...] read on »

Ed Miliband wants your email password

21 January 2009 6 ,

Today's big event on LabourList is Ed Miliband's piece on the launch of LabourSpace.com. He writes: Today I am launching Labourspace.com - the Labour Party's campaign social networking site. I hope it will provide a unique home for organisations and people to host and promote their campaigns - and to bring their ideas to the [...] read on »

Let freedom of information ring

21 January 2009 1 , , ,

It would appear that the plan to exempt MPs and Lords from Freedom Of Information provisions has been ditched. The Mail's Benedict Brogan is trying to unpick what just happened: Gordon Brown claims that Tories have pulled out of a cross-party deal to introduce the change. The suggestion from No10 is that up until yesterday [...] read on »

Technology, Innovation and Government Reform

20 January 2009 0 , ,

In case you miss it in all the festivities... here's a video posted by the incoming Obama administration on the change.gov site, introducing us to the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (aka 'Tigger') team. Some of the names might be familiar: Vivek Kundra, for example, is the guy who swapped Microsoft Office for Google Docs [...] read on »

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