Category: Articles

In Our View Daily: covering an online conference, fast

Socitm’s annual President’s Conference usually takes place over two days somewhere in Britain. This year, the renamed President’s Week took place over five half-days somewhere on Webex. That longer duration provided the chance to try something new in covering the event.

On each of the five days I wrote and edited a four-page PDF newsletter, In Our View Daily, published at the end of the afternoon. This required significant preparation in advance, followed by intensive work every day by Socitm’s staff and myself. Continue reading “In Our View Daily: covering an online conference, fast”

How to work well from home

First published in the May 2020 issue of Socitm In Our View magazine

Large numbers of Britons have recently started working from home (WFH) for the first time or have turned an occasional practice into a full-time one. The sudden shift from communal office to kitchen table or spare bedroom, swapping colleagues for partners, children and pets, will have been disruptive for many. Continue reading “How to work well from home”

EU Settlement Scheme needs to level-up locally

It would be nice if all data was easily comparable and highly accurate, but it’s not. Office for National Statistics numbers on nationality of people in local authority areas are rounded to the nearest thousand to reflect the fact they are survey-based estimates. The ONS recently pointed out a range of problems involved in comparing this dataset to Home Office data on applications to the EU Settlement Scheme.

I still made these comparisons for PublicTechnology, because the differences between areas are huge. Excluding Irish citizens (who generally don’t need to apply to stay in the UK post-Brexit), the number of applications to the EU Settlement Scheme is equivalent to about three-quarters of 3.6 million European citizens in the UK. But for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire and Sevenoaks in Kent, it is around one-quarter.

Map of EU Settlement Scheme applications and non-Irish European populations Continue reading “EU Settlement Scheme needs to level-up locally”

How to build democracy with technology away from elections

There is a lot to be said for a British general election. It is brutally fast in delivering the people’s verdict. It uses technology that everyone can understand and is impossible to hack remotely. And in returning to Rick Wakeman’s prog-rock classic, the BBC has given it back its theme music.

But elections alone are a pretty thin form of democracy. Those who shifted from Labour to vote Conservative did so because of Jeremy Corbyn, because of the party’s far-left manifesto, because of Brexit, because they like Boris Johnson or a mix of these and others. The reasons will come out in surveys and interviews, but aren’t a formal part of the results and the government can ignore them. Continue reading “How to build democracy with technology away from elections”

How cloud computing helped one university to digitise the student experience

Article by SA Mathieson, Guardian Labs, (The Connected University series paid for by Staffordshire University), 4 December 2019

Until recently, a university that wished to remind students about lectures, answer their questions around the clock and provide personalised suggestions on which societies to join would have needed a call centre of support staff working shifts. Staffordshire University is now providing all of these services and others through its app, Beacon, a digital coach for students available on mobile devices accessed through voice and text. Continue reading “How cloud computing helped one university to digitise the student experience”