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Theme : adaptivestate
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Voicing Off
Lots of our recent pamphlets (Start with People, Independent Living, Include Me In) have centred around what it means to 'Start with People' and support them to grow services around their needs, aspirations and communities - to change the things they are choosing between, not just trying to get the best match in advance. We're seeing something similar emerging in our work on the future of further education - users seem to be most satisfied when they play an active role in defining what they...
from : sarahgillinson
22nd September 2005
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A Design for Life
Designing kettles is hard enough, but it's much harder to design services than kettles. The kettle has one end-user, the service could have any number. But a user isn't just a user, a user is a person with a variety of changing needs, desires, values and circumstances.For users to be effectively involved in the design of their services, we have to engage fully with this complexity and fight the urge to generalise for the sake of simplicity.Our discussion delved into this minefield,...
from : kirstenbound
13th September 2005
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I can't get no (customer) satisfaction
Suddenly everyone seems to be talking about customer satisfaction with public services - perhaps because they've noticed that, despite all the money that's been invested, satisfaction is largely plateauing.So we've had Ed Mayo at the National Consumer Council, John Hutton at the Cabinet Office and the NCC, NCVO and CBI all getting in on the act.It's good that someone's finally focussing on the end user. There has to be something wrong when, for instance, inspectorates can report that local...
from : simonparker
6th September 2005
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The way it should be
The topic up for discussion in our seminar was Personalised Learning and the presenters, from an LEA, took us through the work that they have been engaged in over the few months.The exercise that they have been through has been to adopt David Miliband?s five gateways to personalisation as a framework for understanding and directing all of the work they do.Starting with key issues in local schools (such as behaviour and attendance) they have mapped out drivers of these issues (such as lack of...
from : duncanoleary
9th March 2005
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Open Source Public Policy
But you can have projects which are formally open source which do not encourage open source ways of working: an open source airliner might fit into this category. The plans might be available open source but it might be impossible to organise an open source community around the project.Then the question is whether you can generate open source style ways of working - decentralised, collaborative, peer to peer - without needing formal open source ownership. The answer to this is clearly yes but...
from : charlesleadbeater
27th February 2005
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The naked company
There?s a good review on Slashdot of a book called The Naked Corporation, which discusses the effects of new standards of openness. The review argues that tools such as Google make it easy for customers and activists alike to hold companies to account, so that they increasingly have to take the initiative, making openness a priority of their own. For me, one interesting example of such a tool is the Parking Lot Indicatr, to which anyone can submit a night time picture of a company?s car park...
from : johncraig
25th January 2005
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Sure Start's premature obituary
Last week, Norman glass, the father of Sure Start, claimed in the Guardian that the flagship programme had been killed off. The government, for the their part, argued that it had simply been ?rolled-out? to the whole country. Both are an exaggeration ? while Children?s Centres mark a new phase for Sure Start, the broader debate about its principles goes on. As Norman Glass himself observed in an earlier article, one key principle is that of local public involvement and initiative. On...
from : johncraig
11th January 2005
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Adaptive State Awards
I was travelling through Manitoba last month and as has happened a few times over the course of this 13,000km cross-Canada odyssey, I returned to my parking spot a few minutes after the meter had expired. When I noticed a leaflet tucked under my windshield wiper, I expected to find a ticket. Instead I got this:A MESSAGE FROM THE CITY OF WINNIPEGThank you for visiting our City. This Warning indicates that you have disobeyed one of our parkling restrictions. We ask that if you are not familiar...
from : petermacleod
21st November 2004
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A special kind of specialist?
In other words, people who are able to craft a process that is designed to include as many people as possible to participate in the creation of value. At a time when formal political engagement is at an all-time low, this kind of connection between people and politics, practice and policy, is no small challenge. It entails a major shift in culture for our civil servants, the media and our own expectations of government. In this scenario, government might be judged not on whether or not it...
from : sophiaparker
15th September 2004
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Cancer Care
The way in which medical staff provide care for cancer patients was explained to me over the weekend, and it has some really powerful features:- Cancer is dealt with by multi-disciplinary teams. This is borne out the recognition that a surgeon’s clinical knowledge may not always be enough on its own to provide the best overall solution for the patient. In this way, professionals guard against one perspective being allowed to dominate to the detriment others aspects of patient-care.-...
from : duncanoleary
16th August 2004
