DEMOS

• The album formerly sold by... I was bemused watching the news yesterday. Apparently Prince has ‘insulted’ record stores by giving his album away for free with the Mail on Sunday. Now unless this is a comment on the choice of newspaper i don’t get it: did music stores collectively do him a favour in his early career, or did they just sell his records because they were worth selling? And isn’t his own album his to give away? I’m guessing Prince fans aren’t feeling all that insulted right now as they sit at home listening to the album. Or am i missing something..? continue reading Posted by Duncan O'Leary on 16th July 2007 Comments (5)
• 1% solution to the Green Paper Challenge A national Community Governance Service, anybody? continue reading Posted by Kirsten Bound on 12th July 2007
• Recognising Good Work At an event in Sunderland tomorrow, we'll be talking about the different values associated with young people's creative production. More than that, though, there will be a chance to see some of the work itself, and also to hear from its creators about how they see their work. continue reading Posted by Samuel Jones on 11th July 2007 in Making Good Work
• Text with the next – but it may come back to haunt you If you want to be cool in the mobile, digital world, you need to be texting, IMing and posting on social networking sites -- Email is for old people, according to today's FT (where do we go from here).

  But, as we've seen with our FYI project, some people are concerned that all this online action will add up to serious privacy issues, especially if you connect our activities across applications.

  continue reading Posted by Molly Webb on 11th July 2007
• If Caravaggio were around today, chances are he'd be in prison This strikes me as well worth seeing. continue reading Posted by Samuel Jones on 11th July 2007
• Yeah dedication's what you need... if you want to be an innovator woooooh So we launched our new collection, Unlocking Innovation, in a cinema at the BFI yesterday. You can take part in an online debate about it here. Apart from being a pretty cool venue, we heard the new local government minister John Healey talking about the fact that the 'performance paradox' is now one of the biggest challenges the government faces. Services improve, but satisfaction declines. Why? Maybe because we're using the wrong measures, definitely because we don't do enough of the kind of... continue reading 11th July 2007 Comments (1)
• Podcast: Innovation, Innovation, Inn.. ov..a...tion.. ahhh. Yawn... 2 reasons why people will be yawning at  the launch of the Unlocking Innovation collection tomorrow - 1. It's at 8.30 2. It's about Innovation and people might think they've heard it all before. Well think again, and draw this podcast down your tubes. In it Simon and Sophia Parker, the collection's editors, discuss the themes reflected in the essays - namely that innovation in public services doesn’t come from spanking new computers, policy gurus or erm, for that matter, think tank... continue reading Posted by Charlie Tims Sophia Parker on 9th July 2007 in Demos Podcasts
• Talk Us Into It at the Festival of Ideas Last year, we published Talk Us Into It, which examined the role of conversation in the public realm. I'll be talking about it at the Sedbergh Festival of Ideas at the end of this month continue reading Posted by Samuel Jones on 6th July 2007 in Talk us into it
• Podcast: Collaboration Nation Another Friday, another podcast. This is a Simon Parker, Head of Public Services at Demos, discussing a collection of essays we published in March this year titled the Collaborative State. While competition and choice have been the watchwords in public services of late this collection argues that if we want to sustain improvements into the next decade, then we need a new generation of reform that builds on experiments with collaboration between both different parts of the public sector, and... continue reading Posted by Charlie Tims on 6th July 2007 in Demos Podcasts
• Second Service Next week is the launch of a collection of essays titled “Unlocking Innovation” about user-driven innovation edited by Simon and Sophia Parker (not related). It seemed like a good time to stream a lecture that Simon gave back in April to a Swedish delegation at Demos, about making public services more democratic. In the lecture Simon gives a thumbnail sketch of the concept of Everyday Democracy and asks whether the private sector is capable of working with these principles. His... continue reading Posted by Charlie Tims on 4th July 2007

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