Originally published at blog.memespring.co.ukon October 24, 2016.
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Dear England
Dear England,
You have another decision to make. A decision about the sort of country you want to be now the referendum has been decided:
You can ask your politicians to keep on administering the country much as they always have, while working to find an institutional home for the various things currently done by the EU. That is quite a task. More than enough to keep parliament busy (especially while also trying to deal with whatever fallout the referendum has on borders, the economy, society and a divided country).
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EU
Thought for the Day is an anachronism, but there is one (only one) that has ever stuck in my head. It was broadcast in 2012 by Lionel Blue and it was about Europe, particularly about Europe immediately after the war. This is the transcript from the BBC website:
While spring cleaning, I found a packet of postcards I’d sent to my parents from Holland just after the second world war.
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Policy options for getting wider adoption of the jobPosting standard
The UK government has adopted the schema.org jobPosting standard as the format that it will use to publish job vacancies on the web.
Better job adverts are important for a lot of reasons, as pointed out by Citizens Advice. In response to a tweet from Phil Rumens, below is a list of possible ways to get wider use of the standard beyond government.
Make it easier Write and opensource low-level libraries that make it easy to manipulate / generate jobPosting data structures.
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2 local government platforms someone should just build
1) Where things are (as a platform) Reuse the datastore and editing tools behind open streetmap and use it to start managing geographical data (parks, opening times, protected views, lamposts) for a single council. Then give a login to people from other councils and get them to do the same. Use the tagging system to drive out what is common between councils and what differs
2) Things that are happening at a location (as a platform) Lots of local notices (planning applications, parking suspensions, licencing applications) can be boiled down to:
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Gherkin - a universal language for accountable bots?
You can’t view source in Google Now.
Software agents of one sort or another (bots, digital assistants, news feed algorithms) seem set to make more and more decisions for us.
How will we know how they are reaching their decisions? How will we know when a decision based on a something that aligns with our best interests vs the company who provide the software?
Will some critical bots need to become subject to auditing and regulation?
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It’s not about the technology! (Apart from when it is).
“Digital/transformation/business is not about technology it’s about design / strategy / culture” is a recurring meme. It can be a comforting thing to cling on to, and it’s probably true a lot of the time, but is also not true in some important respects.
Technology does matter. Good digital / design / business / transformation / culture / strategy requires an understanding of the materials.
Open Streetmap came into existence 10 years ago in part because of affordable consumer GPS units and open-source GIS software; bespoke on-demand printing services like moo.
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7 project ideas
Some things from an Evernote notebook called ‘ideas’:
Open Need Map A structured wiki for mapping things that are needed by people and organisations at particular places. eg items at a food bank, volunteer tasks for organisations, items required at a refugee camp. Data would be available via an API so, for example, it would be possible for a third-party e-commerce service to invite you to add something a local charity needs to your basket, or for an employer that gives it’s staff time off to volunteer to add local volunteering opportunities directly to an employee’s pay slip.
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Fosdem 2016 links and notes
Richard Pope, 02 March 2016
* [Argüman](http://en.arguman.org) is an argument mapping tool. It uses visual presentation of a subject and a limited language set ('but', 'because', 'however') to map out the pros and cons of a subject - the aim is to aid critical thinking and quick learning. [Here's the argüman for cats vs dogs](http://en.arguman.org/cats-are-better-than-dogs-276225bea7cb41a1a580d5c30af995eb). There was lots of talk about making it easier for IoT devices to talk to each other.
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10 rules for distributed / networked / platformed government
Earlier this year, when I was working with Jamie, Tom, Anna, Paul, Stephen and Adam on a vision for Government as a Platform, I got stuck on the Central Line on the way back from work and ended up trying to distill all the things the team were talking about. The list below was the result.
I’m posting it here because Jamie keeps on telling me I should (he’s normally right), and in case it’s useful to anyone who happens to find themselves redesigning a government:
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Changing changes of circumstance: 7 alternative design patterns
Lots of government services require their users to report when things in their life or an organisation change.
This places a lot of responsibility on the user - they need a good mental model of the service to know what to report, when they should do it and how. It also generates a need for lots of secondary transactions and services: update this, report that, change this, re-apply for that.
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This Place Is Ours: check-in to add this pub to the Assets of Community Value Register
This has been sitting in my Google Docs since May, so I figured I’d just publish it here.
“This Place Is Ours” is the working name for an app that helps people club together to protect their local pub, skate-park, village hall or park by adding it to the Register of Assets of Community Value.
The Localism Act 2011 and associated regulations require local authorities to maintain a list of assets of community value.
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Empathy, augmented - public services as digital assistants
Empathy, augmented - public services as digital assistants Google Now is probably the best known example of the so called ‘intelligent digital assistants’*. It suggests relevant information based on your location, your calendar and your emails. So, for example, it might automatically track a parcel based on a confirmation email from Amazon, or nudge you with the quickest route home based on your location.
Google Now is (for now) confined to day-to-day admin, and using it feels very obviously like having a machine help you out (and I’d guess a machine that runs off simple ‘given these events have happened, then do this thing’ rather than any artificial intelligence cleverness).
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Product Land (Part 3)
This is the 3rd and final part of an essay about design and possibilities.
The first part - You can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place - was about the process of design being too linear, taking inspiration from evolution and the concept of hyper-volumes of ‘potential products’; the second part - Tools for exploring the margins - listed some approaches for thinking harder about the things that are possible in product design.
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Open standards for job vacancies
Open standards can be a force-multiplier: a standard voltage for electricity abstracts away how the electricity was generated, this allows companies to confidently and cheaply build everything from household lighting to MRI scanners on top of it. An open standard can enable a wider public good.
Vacancy publishing today is skeuomorphic, not in the visual sense, rather it is functionally skeuomorphic: newspaper small ads put on the web (with the addition of a basic search).
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Brand archaeology
![Reverse of a TfL bike key with plastic pealed back to reveal a Barclay']s URL](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7704/16995499017_535832226d_k_d.jpg)
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Telegraph laws
This was part of the telegraph zone of the new Information Age gallery at the Science Museum:
New technology, new data integrity and privacy laws?
There’s a couple of mentions of section II in Hansard here and here. It was part of a bill introduced by reformer Henry Fawcett when he was Postmaster General. Seemingly it only gets those mentions in Hansard due to inteventions from Charles Warton who was a bit of a pedant for process (although objecting to a bill being read at 5 AM does seem reasonable).
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Permissions. Understood.
This is part follow up to The challenge for web developers in 2015, part inspired by Francis Irving’s The advert wars.
Better patterns for helping users understand software permissions feels like an imperative; somewhere a lot more technical, design and research thinking should be directed.
By permissions I mean ‘what bits of software are allowed to do with data and input/outputs’, and the mechanism by which a user is informed of those things.
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Product Land (Part 2)
Tools for exploring the margins.
In the part 1 I set out the proposition that the way we think about building digital products is too linear and, as a result, our thinking about what is possible is constrained, with some sectors, I used the example of the ‘job-search’ sector, stuck shuffling around a local minima.
Instead, I suggested we should take a lead from evolutionary biology and start thinking about a hypervolume of potential products - after all, you can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place.
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Habitat - Fosdem 2015 talk
This is the talk I gave at Fosdem 2015 about a proof-of-concept
personal datastore called Habitat.
My name is Richard Pope, and I am going to talk to you about a proof of concept service I’m building called Habitat. Habitat is a self hosted, programmable geospatial datastore, or a kind of digital assistant, an external brain like google now or IFTT. Or rather it could be, for now Habitat is just a proof of concept to try and scratch some particular itches:
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