I had a nice interview with Simon Morton on Radio NZ this morning, talking about (inter alia) the development of the NZ Startup ecosystem, recycling capital, the Lean methodology, the scientific method, and its application to policy development. Listen to it here, … or jump over to the Radio New Zealand web site.
Continue reading →It must be that time of year again. There seems to be heightened activity of script-driven attacks on servers. Most of these attacks are attempted brute-force password cracks of WordPress accounts. Here’s a list of countries (by ISO country code) that attacks have come on one of my servers from in the last 48 hours….
Continue reading →I was contacted by Radio New Zealand this morning, who asked if I had any thoughts about Lorde’s recent decision to cancel her concert in Tel-Aviv, in support of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). This is what I told them. It’s complicated. A lot more complicated than most people can take in or are willing…
Continue reading →Our home landline phone number gets switched off today. When we got our first landline, it was provided by the Post Office. We had a four-week wait – I guess they were too busy delivering letters. When we got our current number after moving into the neighbourhood, it was only six digits. We got a…
Continue reading →Enabling government innovation at scale will require much better engagement and collaboration between government agencies with the private and community sectors. Key points: Government will need to be good at being a keystone member of a community it doesn’t control The magic happens when people do new, unexpected things built on government services Great communication…
Continue reading →Government procurement for innovative solutions sucks. Here’s one way to fix it. I was privileged to participate in the Startup Nations Summit Policy Hack earlier this year in Tallinn, Estonia. This one day policy hackathon brought together representatives from all over the world, working on different problems. On the day before the Policy Hack, the…
Continue reading →As I work more and more with government innovators, I’ve learned that despite the fact that we come at it from many different angles, there is a common ethos and camaraderie. We’re all after the same thing: to improve government to better serve the governed. They say we get the government we deserve. We say…
Continue reading →One of the true delights of having kids is their help in music discovery. One of mine is a diehard death metal fan, and recently introduced me to Zeal and Ardor. I had a little listen to their YouTube collection, and came to Children’s Summon. It starts off with a pleasantly jingly xylophone solo that…
Continue reading →I’ve been invited to participate in the Startup Nations Summit in Tallinn, Estonia this coming November, representing New Zealand. The central event at this year’s summit will be a Policy Hack, in which delegates from all over the world will get together to collaboratively nut out government policies relating to startups. If you’ve ever spoken…
Continue reading →I’ve been running fail2ban on my Linux servers for years. It’s a neat little piece of software that detects people trying to break into your system, and then ignores any further packets from the intruder’s IP address for a period of time. It comes as a standard package for many distributions, and is easy to…
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