Francis Bacon
Digital Communications Editor, The Royal Society
Director, moreconference
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Tweets
- Rredundancy, resiliency, adaptability, programmability and human ingenuity, are key to keeping distant hardware going http://t.co/QITvEJzvds
- RT @omarlyefookMBE: Just got a job playing triangle in a reggae band. It's pretty easy, I just stand at the back and ting.
- RT @arielwaldman: 9 people from 4 different countries are in space right now. http://t.co/D2HvyJm1Up
- Really enjoyed 'Visions of the future' at maritime museum. Huge panoramas of Mars' surface were real treat.
- RT @dcjarvis: Now this is marketing that... works http://t.co/dfDeAEyCCl
- "It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed...We repress our benevolence and tenderness" http://t.co/RCuF5U6TFM
- Chas Bountra: Finding a cure for Alzheimer's is harder than putting a man on Mars. Open science is the only way. http://t.co/yu0pD0Jat2
- RT @radleybalko: No terrorist attacks = "See? All these powers we've claimed are keeping you safe." New terrorist attack = "This is why we …
- RT @EdwardGLuce: America's data-intelligence complex: my take on latest NSA revelations. http://t.co/mop9IzoMjB
- Businessmen feeding ducks in the park look so lonely, even though they're being more outgoing than the rest of us.
- Fallen into wikipedia hole as a result of this talk on DCI programming by Jim Coplien http://t.co/RgxK9r176c
- RT @summerscience: A sweet treat for you all! Lovely animated video about the science of sugars from our exhibitors @sugarcomplexity http:/…
- Good intro to linked data. InfoQ video on BBC's Linked Data Platform and APIs http://t.co/qCpAaeRCQ2
- RT @imrankhan: Reminder; looking for web geek (£35k) to join @britsciassoc to help fix our website & rethink our digital strategy: http://t…
- RT @AdamWestbrook: MT @jeshuamaxey: Incredible article from @AdamWestbrook on the future of visual storytelling. Absolute must read http://…
- "The Big Shift means changing how research projects are conceived, pitched, funded, and produced..." http://t.co/E57z9VeAKB
- Fork that data. OKFN experiment using github for datasets http://t.co/nIsc2opyo5
- Check out photos from today's #RSgamejam http://t.co/B5MqDzoq7F
- RT @tomskitomski: Old dominant culture: http://t.co/e4IdA6Rplt New dominant culture: http://t.co/VmKkgw1LNW (Much respect to many fine form…
- Lots of fun and GAMES at work today #sse13 http://t.co/1SbPwZ0y1K
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Posts
- Feb 09, 13
What’s the difference between corporate IT and digital – and what should their roles be in producing and supporting the organisation’s digital products and services?
If the difference is just the name, then there obviously is no difference. But IT teams and digital teams also typically have staff with different skills, are positioned differently within an organisation and are set different objectives by senior management.
At its heart, IT is about developing and maintaining technology that supports the business. Good enterprise IT naturally seeks stable and predictable outcomes - which may be the reason it often appears slow, risk-averse and resistant to change. Its key tenets are efficiency, cost-control and reliability.
Digital teams have to innovate more quickly, because they are operating in such a fast-moving and competitive environment. Whether they are producing and supporting online products or using digital marketing to promote offline products, it’s usually better to embrace risk and change than stability and control.
However I wonder whether this approach might only work while ‘digital’ is in a relatively immature state in an organisation: a novelty which is given free rein. Is digital’s love of risk and change sustainable when teams and responsibilities grow – and success online becomes crucial for the organisation?
The answer partly depends on the organisational model adopted. If the digital team remains centralised then it may be able to maintain its own working style and culture. But in most organisations it’s going to make more sense for responsibilities for designing and producing digital outputs to be at least partly decentralized – so that staff are embedded in the departments which receive the value from their work.
If digital becomes decentralized, how can coherence be maintained across all digital products? How does an organisation ensure that its user experiences work well together – and that its output adds up to more than the sum of its parts?
I think organisations will do that in the same way as they do it in other realms (such as human resources, finance and branding): by setting and enforcing standards. It’s inevitable that the job of central digital teams will increasingly be to decide strategies, policies and procedures for online content, design and technology – and to conduct training, auditing and enforcement to maintain standards.
Which brings us back to the difference between IT and digital. Is the difference in style purely a result of the relative maturity of one over another?
I’m not sure – but I do think that the challenge for digital managers is clear: use standards to evolve to a more mature model which supports digital activities across the organisation, while staying innovative and competitive.
- Sep 05, 12
I’ve been thinking about how to help policy teams make better use of the web.
Here are some messaging styles that could be applied to policy outputs:
- Immersive: The dangers of fracking website is compelling, even though the arguments are debatable.
- Social: Due Diligence was written in the open, incorporating comments from readers.
- Narrative: An unquiet landscape uses annotated video to take the reader on a journey.
- Exploratory: Gapminder helps the user to explore the arguments.
- Inspirational: TED talks persuade and inspire.
What other styles are there?
- Sep 04, 12
It wants you to:
- co-create with customers and audiences
- disassemble packages into their constituent parts
- disintermediate between users and value-producers
- represent the whole organisation
- uncover information and make it transparent
- Aug 22, 12
How do you ensure that an organisation’s web estate conforms to consistent, high-quality design? It’s a problem I’ve recently been addressing.
Drawing inspiration from GOV UK’s work and the BBC’s Global Experience Language, I’ve developed a visual design pack, which has instructions for some of the common design choices and patterns. We’re hoping it will speed up development time as well as improve consistency across our websites.
One of the challenges has been balancing the need to record the current design choices and the desire to introduce new improvements to it. Without the help of an in-house web designer, it’s got to be a balance between where we are now and where we want to be.
I’ve drawn heavily on Twitter Bootstrap for some of the common elements such as buttons and tables. It’s a very powerful and comprehensive framework which should help us tremendously.
One aspect of Bootstrap which initially looked useful was its responsive grid system. However, after further investigation, I’ve realised that this will cause problems for our existing content – particularly images, which would have to be resized. Instead, the pack recommends that sites adopt 4 simple fixed breakpoints: 320px (mobile), 640px (tablet), 960px (desktop) and 1280px (large). Our current design is quite ‘blocky’ so should relatively easy to reflow nicely into the new templates.
Here’s what the visual design pack covers:
- Grid
- Typography
- Colours
- Masthead
- Menu
- Illustrated banner
- Blocks
- Images
- Features
- Tables
- Icons and buttons
- Blockquotes
- Slideshows and lightboxes
- Footer
- Forms
- Miscellaneous
- Jun 24, 12
I’m currently writing a digital strategy for the organisation I work for – a non-profit promoting science.
I want to include some principles as part of the strategy – to help us make decisions about which projects to undertake and how to design them. They’re inspired by the Government’s own design principles.
- User needs: The design process must start with identifying and thinking about real user needs. We should design around those — not around existing processes.
- Holism: Our audiences and customers see us as one organisation. We should build coherent user journeys that work across different services.
- Accessibility: Our users are diverse and all should be able to access our services equally. We should build products that are as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. Our services should be available where our users want to access them, whichever device or platform that is on.
- Longevity: We should build services that last and that can be accessed for years to come. Our digital information should be preserved and archived for future generations.
- Openness: Openness means that other people can build on our work and share it more widely. We should share our content others and release it under a liberal copyright licence. We should use open standards and open formats where possible and avoid becoming locked to particular platforms. Our services should be interoperable and extendable.
- Social: Social media is creating a new relationship between organisations and users, in which the conversation is two-way and content is co-created. We should use social media to communicate with our audiences and customers and we should always consider it when we’re designing new services.
- Security: We may face security risks. We should ensure that we adopt a level of security appropriate to each risk.
- Consistency: Consistency means that people become familiar with us and trust us more. We should use consistent language and design patterns wherever possible.
- Feedback loop: Building in a strong feedback loop means we get better over time. We should use feedback from users – surveys, testing or analytics – as much as possible throughout the prototyping and development phases and when a service is deployed.
What other principles would you add to these?
- Jun 01, 12
Every now and again I like to dip back into coding. Nothing else has that strange combination of intense frustration, when the bugs refuse to be squashed, and deep satisfaction, when what was once an idea becomes a stilt-walking reality.
My latest project is ProSocial, a free WordPress plugin.
It shows a pop-up bar next to blog authors’ names, with links to their social media accounts. Hopefully it will be a useful way for owners of multi-author blogs to connect their readers with their writers.
Although it’s on a much smaller scale, ProSocial draws inspiration from a host of exciting products that connect people’s dispersed (and often fragmented) digital identities: iftt, flavors.me, hojoki.
As people spread their digital lives about, it seems to me that there is an increasing need for services that bring them back together again.
ProSocial will be in the WordPress plugin directory shortly.
Let me know what you think!
- Apr 15, 12
This week I went to my first teacamp – an informal meetup for people working on digital in government. The topic was what should be in the forthcoming social media guidance for public servants.
Personal v professional
Much of the discussion hinged on the balance between public servants’ right to a personal life and their professional responsibilities to their organisation.
Now that it’s easy to use the web to work out who someone works for, the risk is that people’s opinions or indiscretions will damage the organisation or be used to criticise it.
What if a policy officer tweeted something at odds with the corporate position? The press might seize on this.
Nick Halliday, Matt Jukes and Terence Eden have also blogged on this discussion.
Radical transparency
For me, the distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ is no longer a helpful one.
I see the web as being radically transparent, in that it not only enables more information to be published, it also helps people to make connections that they otherwise could not make.
Think of this: today you could scrape LinkedIn for a list of Twitter handles of staff at a government department. Analyze their streams and you might find opinions at odds with departmental policy.
The web will increasingly expose inconsistencies like this.
What’s actually happening is that the idea of the organisation is under attack. It was always the case that people’s personal and professional lives were inconsistent – it’s just that the web is now finally exposing this.
The personal is political
Let’s also remember that every statement, however seemingly innocuous, carries implicit value judgements and is in some sense ‘political’.
The words we use, the sources we read, the thoughts that occupy us (or not) reveal our values – and it is these values that are at the heart of political debate.
Tweeting that you enjoyed The Matrix is ‘personal’, until you realise that someone else saw it as a Christian metaphor and others as a dystopian warning about out-of-control technology. And someone else thinks you should only be watching films about their pet issue anyway.
There is no statement which does not carry implicit values (and in fact making no statements also expresses values).
Freedom of expression
The world is going to have to live with the idea that organisations’ opinions and those of their staff are not the same. Hopefully the novelty of this will soon fade.
So what to do with those social media guidelines?
In my opinion they should make an explicit attempt to protect public servants’ freedom of expression – a fundamental human right.
The greatest risk here is not that organisations will be embarrassed by the contradiction between their statements and those of their employees (that will happen anyway) but that public servants feel they cannot use social media to engage in political debates or even express themselves in a ‘personal’ way.
Public servants make up about 20% of the workforce and they’re going to be using social media more and more. A protection for freedom of expression is needed to make sure they do not become disenfranchised.
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Reading
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Recent Tracks
- Amethyst by Low
- Plastic Cup by Low
- Happy Hour by The Housemartins
- Animalistic by Can't Stop Won't Stop
- Fire and Rain by Can't Stop Won't Stop
- Nightcap by Can't Stop Won't Stop
- Scrape The Sky (feat. Fresh Big Mouf) by Can't Stop Won't Stop
- NPR (feat. Sid) by Can't Stop Won't Stop
- For the Love by Can't Stop Won't Stop
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Posts
- South Downs
Train to Hassocks then followed the South Downs path towards Lewes.
Stayed overnight at YHA Telscombe, then walked to the coast at Peacehaven.
We walked along the coast to Newhaven, past the chalk cliffs:
Then train back from Newhaven after breakfast at Luna Rossa.
- Indonesia
Took Emirates flight to Jakarta via Dubai and stayed a couple of nights. Then took the train to Yogyakarta, where we stayed at Prambanan Guest House (chilled atmosphere, lovely breakfasts, super pool). We enjoyed eating at Via Via, being massaged the House of Relaxing and visiting Borobudur (below) and Prambanan (also experiencing there the recommended Ramayana Ballet).
We then took a train to Surabaya, in order to catch a Merpati flight to Lombok. In retrospect flying to Surabaya might have been preferable although we did see a cool volcano on the way.
In Lombok we hired a car and took a weekend road trip visiting the Southwest peninsula. First night at Bola Bola Paradis, next to a fantastic white-sand beach (although there were unidentified spiny black creatures in the sea).
On the second day we drove to Kuta, finding en route that the road south via Pelangang was closed and then that the road via Sepi does indeed require a 4WD!
Kuta itself wasn’t much more than a surf town although the cove (above) was pretty spectacular.
From Kuta we drove to Sengiggi and in the torrential rain stumbled upon the Puri Saron hotel, which had an amazing pool flanked by bougainvillea (below) and very few guests so was a lucky find.
The following day we took a speedboat to Gili Meno, where we were landed on the beach below, jumping straight onto the sand from the boat. We stayed at Meno Dream Resort which was a relative hideaway on the West side of the island. The atmosphere was very chilled and the rooms were great.
The snorkelling on Gili Meno was a real highlight - lots of coral, hundreds of fish species and tortoises. Taking a boat out for a morning was cheap.
We ate a few times at Rust Warung but also enjoyed Ya-Ya Cafe which we only found on the last night.
We took the slow boat back to Lombok, to savour the view:
- South West Coast Path
Stayed overnight in Exeter then caught train to Barnstaple and taxi to Clovelly. Walked Clovelly to Hartland Quay and stayed at Hartland Quay Hotel (nothing special) because it was raining.
The following day it rained, so we hung out in Hartland and stayed at their campsite. On Monday we walked Hartland Quay to Bude, a fantastic stretch of coastal walking through countless coombes.
Ended the day by camping just outside of Bude, at Sandymouth. Then walked into Bude to catch the bus back to Exeter.
- Paris
Took an early Eurostar on Friday morning and stayed at Hotel Eldorado, near Place de Clichy. After a lazy Parisian afternoon we watched In Time at the Pathé, struggling to keep up with the French dialogue.
On Saturday we shopped in the “back passages of time” arcades on the right bank - appropriate for a rainy day. By chance, an amazing lunch in Les Mesturet (duck, blue cheese lasagne) then later incredible food at Le Bistrot de Dames (lamb, steak tartare!) - the restaurant underneath the hotel.
On Sunday we found the Rodin Museum, having aborted an attempt at Musée d’Orsay. Late afternoon train got us back to London at 7.
- Goecha La, Sikkim, India
More photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baconandeggs/sets/72157627957577554/
We flew into Bagdogra from Delhi and then got a taxi to Gangtok, where we organised the trek with Vajra Adventure Tours for $50 pppd. You have to go via Gangtok (rather than Darjeeling) in order to obtain the permit. The trek then starts from Yuksom which is a 4/5 hour journey from Gangtok.
It is possible to organise the trek in Yuksom but the town is quite small and you might have to wait for availability. You have to take a guide on the trek (although this is only checked at the park entrance) and unless you are well-equipped with tents (for the guide too) and food (for 7 days) then you’ll have to also use animals - either horses or dzo. Their handler, a cook and one or two other helpers will probably also come too.
On the way out we went directly to Darjeeling, which has the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, a quirky Natural History Museum and lots of tea plantations. Instead of flying we took the train from NJP to Delhi (32 hours).
- Isle of Skye
On Thursday 26 May 2011, we caught the Caledonian Express from Euston to Glasgow, which arrived late, then connecting trains to Kyle of Lochalsh. We camped by Sligachan Hotel.
On Friday we walked up Glen Sligachan as far as Loch Dubha and saw a golden eagle.
On Saturday we tried to walk round North up the coast but overflowing streams blocked our path. So we trekked on the road to Portree instead and ate at the superb Lower Deck Seafood. Local ales and Arran whiskey at the Sligachan bar with a German couple.
On Sunday we walked over the pass to Glenbrittle Forest and then on a road to Merkadale. Bussed back to Sligachan from the A863.
Tip for next time: although the train from Inverness to Kyle is special (especially the last 30 mins into Kyle) it would be quicker and simpler to get the coach from Glasgow.
Schittorn, Bernese Alps (2970m)
Mount Murud (2423m)
Moldoveanu, Fagaras Mountains (2544m)
Jbel Toukbal, Atlas Mountains (4167m)
Snowdon (1038m), Y Garn (947m), Glyder Fawr (999m) and Glyder Fach (994m), Snowdonia
Scafell Pike (978m), Great Gable (899m) and Helvellyn (950m) Lake District
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Posts
- Social web
- Responsiveness beats planning
- Communities beat audiences
- Reputation beats branding
- Sociality beats media-mentality
- Habits of Mind
Students should be:
- pattern sniffers
- experimenters
- describers
- tinkerers
- inventors
- visualizers
- conjecturers
- guessers
<p>The four modes of guru-guru thinking: 1) Feeling 2) Scattering 3) Finding 4) Polishing</p> <p>From here on, it is not how quickly you can find an answer to a question, but how interesting you can make the question to begin with. The point is taking that seemingly hopeless question and turning it into a drama that has grasped everyone’s attention.</p>
Dentsu, The IDEA TextbookIf you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-ExuperyObjectives
Brand | Strategy | Relationships
Messaging | Community | Transactions
Design | Content | Technology
- Pillars of News
- Timeliness
- Impact
- Proximity
- Surprise
- Prominence
- Novelty
- Human interest
- Conflict
- Exclusivity
- 8 behaviours of a good manager
1. Be a good coach
2. Don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in employees’ well-being
4. Be productive and results-orientated
5. Listen to your team
6. Help employees’ career development
7. Have a clear vision
8. Have key technical skillsGoogle People Development Team
- Digital transformation
- Service design based on user needs
- Modern, flexible, common technology platforms
- Policy and delivery tightly integrated
- Specialist roles, senior leadership roles and service manager role
- Changes communicated and marketed effectively
- Government Digital Strategy
- What content has to be
- compellingly interesting
- indispensably useful
- unmissably entertaining
- Principles of coaching
- Coaching is about change
- The coach and client are equals
- The client is resourceful
- The coach’s role is to work with and develop the client’s resourcefulness
- The coach should not to give advice
- The coach should address the whole person: Past, present and future
- Emotional Leadership Styles
- Visionary: Move people to shared dreams when a clear direction is needed
- Coaching: Connect a person’s desires with the organisation’s goals to build long-term capability
- Affiliative: Connect people to one another to heal rifts and motivate
- Democratic: Seek people’s input to build buy-in
- Pacesetting: Meet challenging goals to get high results
- Commanding: Give clear direction in an emergency
Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, in Primal Leadership
- Stages of team development
- Forming: Members are unclear, leader directs
- Storming: Members vie for position, leader is challenged
- Norming: Members agree, leader facilitates
- Performing: Members thrive, leader delegates
- Team roles
- Plant: Generates ideas
- Resource Investigator: Purses contacts and opportunities
- Co-ordinator: Draws out team members
- Shaper: Challenges the team to improve
- Monitor Evaluator: Makes impartial judgements
- Teamworker: Helps teams gel
- Implementer: Turns suggestions into action
- Completer Finisher: Makes sure everything is “just right”
- Specialist: Passionate about their own particular field
Belbin Team Inventory
- SOAR
- Situation: set context
- Objectives: define outcomes and constraints
- Activity
- Results: measure
For functional experts, leave the Activity to them.
