Andrea Di Maio, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, asks a question that is central to my work at eBriefings.ca –
He also raises the point separately about government wikis and their use in policy analysis.
Monthly Archives: December 2008
Why Briefing Notes Are Important
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
Charles Peters. How Washington Really Works. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.
The Other Peters Principle
“The Peters Principle-take care to distinguish it from the less persuasive Peter Principle -provides that organizations cease to function effectively when employees spend more than 15.8 percent of their time attending meetings or writing memoranda.”
Tilting at windmills – meeting mania…review thine enemy…buppie taste…and other odds and ends
Washington Monthly, Feb, 1986, by Charles Peters.
Derek Zoolander, Governor of the Bank of Canada
Web 2.0 Vocabulary
In developing a presentation and a proposal centred around the idea of Web 2.0, I created a Wordle of terms associated-with / that-define Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 Wordle by Justin Longo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at www.wordle.net. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.whitehallpolicy.ca.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that the user provides. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Words and concepts were derived from a number of sources. To make some words and concepts more prominent in the Wordle than others, I simply used my judgment to force increased frequency on terms and concepts that I thought were more important than others.
I would really appreciate any feedback on this – especially with respect to two questions:
1. Any complaints about the frequency / prominance of some terms? For example, is “Silverlight” too prominent? (I think it is). BTW: “Tim Berners-Lee” is prominent partly out of respect and partly because of his critique of Web 2.0 being nothing new.
2. Any obvious missing terms (and the corollary, terms that really shouldn’t be there)?
Life Imitates Art
Stephen Harper’s broadcast to the nation
bears an uncanny resemblance to the two following clips:
The Ministerial Broadcast 1 from about 1:50 to the end,
and
The Ministerial Broadcast 2 from the beginning to about 3:30
At least Harper studies something. Stephane Dion’s response was beyond pathetic
Justin Longo, phd 