Pioneering spirit

OK, so I’ve been working in the public sector strategy area for a few months now and having spent a bit of time seeing how the land lies, feel the time is right to step it up a gear (this is in no small part prompted by the new guidelines for online participation by civil servants).

With this being my first ever post, I’ll start with a customary bit of background – I am 32 years old and ‘celebrated’ my civil service 10-year anniversary earlier this month. I guess that puts me at the tail end of Generation X, just a little too old for Generation Y. While this is a sweeping generalisation, I tend to agree. I can identify with all each of Forrester's social technology classifications such as:

• using RSS feeds to keep up to date with blogs
• having profiles on Flickr and Facebook (might share these later – I’ll see how it goes for now, though)
• occasionally posting reviews or posts on forums (fora?)

And now I have a blog.

So while I may be (relatively) young and (relatively) junior, I don’t think for a second that I am one of the ‘digital pioneers’ Tom Watson wants to join up:

There are an incredibly large number of digital pioneers across the civil service—young people who may be junior in status—and one of my jobs is to try to join them all up so that they can enlighten their older counterparts in more senior positions.

Still, we all have to have dreams, hence the rather ambitious blog title (that and the fact it takes ages just to find an available blog title).

I’ll try to be active, involved and interesting. I feel I have something to offer and hope that it is of value. I don’t know exactly what that is just yet and I expect to be challenged along the way – this is just me putting my head above the parapet.