I've got a rough and ready rule for assessing whether a website is kosher or not. Is there an easily accessible "About" page. It's not infallible, but if that basic test isn't passed I get a bit suspicious. At yesterday's Spark the Change conference there was a presentation from a representative from the US-based "platform … Continue reading Accountability
Category: Politics
So news arrived this morning that one of Ukip's prominent non-white supporters, Sanya-Jeet Thandi, is leaving the party because "they are playing the race card". Putting aside for a moment what terrible political judgement Ms Thandi must have to have signed up in the first place (apparently it was their economic liberalism that attracted her, … Continue reading I’m not a racist, but…
One of the things that seems to be common amongst people working in start ups is the idea of "the exit". In the days before this current wave of digital technology transformation, to set up a company you needed some serious capital. To manufacture things you needed factories and hardware. To provide some sort of service you … Continue reading Rushing towards the exits
There's one of my many potted theories that I've recounted to a few folks over the past couple of weeks that I thought worth retelling here. It's basically a way to keep your head up when confronted by the madness of corporate bureaucracy... There is a whole body of knowledge in the world of Sociology known … Continue reading Everything has a reason
After my recent ramblings about the lack of diversity of thought within the tech industry, co-incidentally my former Microsoft colleague Ben Nunney is just in the process of launching a new campaigning body called ethicalco.de. The, particularly internetty, world of tech is a bit of a dichotomous mess. On the one hand you have Edward … Continue reading Diversity in tech
In the way that only social networks allow, I got into a brief conversation this morning with Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and the person spearheading digital initiatives in the EU, and Martha Lane-Fox the digital entrepreneur. On Saturday it's International Women's Day, and Neelie tweeted: https://twitter.com/NeelieKroesEU/status/441501736147378176 My response was that, whilst … Continue reading Gender imbalance
Insurance is an interesting game. Essentially it's an activity of risk management: attempting to find things of concern to a large number of people that are relatively improbable. The gap between the insurance premiums and the payouts is the profit margin, and at the core of the whole proposition is the unknown risk. As a … Continue reading Reducing risk
The recent Year of Code debacle has had me looking back at the work of the first great coding educationalist, Seymour Papert. If you're not aware of Papert's work, but you are of a certain age, you may have come across his programming language invention Logo - a syntax to control the actions of … Continue reading Purple turtles
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to learn to code. It wasn't a "right" - I was just lucky to be in a home where there was a computer (a BBC Micro that my dad had supplied by his work). In those days in the mid-Eighties, coding was pretty much synonymous … Continue reading A fuller appreciation
Two themes in my Twitter stream today that have been fused together in my mind. 1) the government's Universal Credit benefits reform, turning into a great beast of a disaster. At it's core (from where I see it) "IT disasters" resulting from ineffective change management, an over-confidence that technology in its own right can deliver … Continue reading Would learning to code help?
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