5th February 2019
Skopje, North Macedonia
Macedonia is firmly set to use open data to continue its path towards more accountable and transparent state institutions. The current government has upgraded the already initiated process by not just committing to the Open Government Partnership, but also by drafting an Open Data Strategy with Action Plan, by adopting the International Open Data Charter […]
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20th February 2018
Montreal, Canada
There are over 100 Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups and more than 250 AI and Machine Learning (ML) scientists based in Montreal. It is no surprise then that this popular city has become a global powerhouse for AI R&D and entrepreneurship. Following Montreal’s four-day programme in October, I in collaboration with UK partners[1] organised an AI […]
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9th May 2017
Chennai, India
In March, I had the absolute delight of visiting India for the first time in my life and the whole week was an adventure, both personally and commercially. Experiencing the Indian way of life, the hospitality and incredible proactivity to doing business were all eye-opening, as was the traffic! I help run Innovation Birmingham, the […]
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30th March 2017
London, UK
Last year, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought together an interesting bunch of people from around the world, and me, to discuss digital diplomacy. I found myself speaking second on a panel. The first speaker announced the publication of the Digital Diplomacy Review 2016, ranking foreign ministries around the world. The United Kingdom was top. […]
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1st February 2017
London, UK
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is always front and centre of the UK government’s response to an overseas crisis. They’re always high pressure events and lives are often on the line. Depending on the scale there’s a whole set of processes and teams that swing into action, all centred around our Crisis Management Department (CMD), […]
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1st September 2016
London, UK
One of the first experiences I had of an Emergency travel document was covered in a series of photo casebooks I wrote last year. I actually had to cut out some of what happened because you wouldn’t have believed me – but now that you are all desensitised to a man losing his passport between […]
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25th August 2016
London, UK
A while ago, I blogged about the vast levels of complexity we faced digitising the application process for Emergency travel documents. Today I’d like to look at a little more detail at one of our responses to that: building a data-driven application and how we control what is displayed. In my earlier blog, I talked […]
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26th April 2016
London, UK
Last year I wrote a number of ‘Photo casebooks’ talking about what an emergency travel document is, and our plans to digitise the application process for an emergency travel document. The project is still invitation only, but has now been rolled out worldwide; and at least until our legalisation online project goes live, it is […]
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18th December 2015
London, UK
At the start of 2015 the Digital Transformation Unit set itself an ambitious to do list. After the euphoria of celebrating our first anniversary, the year has been defined by hard graft as we’ve worked with colleagues across the FCO to begin work on how to deliver digital services to British people across the world […]
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2nd December 2015
London, UK
In October I blogged about our first exploration of Snapchat as a tool to communicate and engage with people on the work of the Foreign Office. I signed off with a challenge to myself to understand how best to measure and evaluate our success on an app with very limited analytical capability and no website for […]
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