Overview: Politics

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

Three articles unpacking the relationship between community, communications, content and EU communications.

author of The Content Trap and professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the strategic challenges facing digital businesses, and explains how he and his colleagues wrestled with them when designing HBX, the school’s online learning platform... success for the best companies does not come from making the best content, it comes from recogniz…

"Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They're not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.... connect people through sharing and conversation to form communities that we can then cultivate. That takes understanding, purpose, intent and genuineness.

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

Great example of modern US longform content from Vox, where they use a specific style to link to one of their 'content cards'. Plus a killer quote on the 'blame Brussels' syndrome: "... banks that owned eurozone government debt were saved, and so were institutions around the world ... Meanwhile, politicians got to take credit for keeping their c…

worth repeating for everyone who thinks that the path to democracy in the EU is measured in column inches...

" social marketers mistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following. They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as key performance indicators and then blast them with brand messages. The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to y…