Social Innovation Camp 2 (The Revenge!) was an amazing experience – tiring, draining, seemingly unending, but fun, fulfilling and infinitely rewarding. Around 60 people descended onto 7 different ideas trying to make positive social change to bring them from the glint of an idea into a project that could be taken on past the weekend. The key idea … Read more
Becoming a freelance consultant is a dream for many. I’ve been lucky enough to have a successful freelance career as a social media and digital PR consultant for the last few years. There’s been some bumps along the way, but advice and encouragement from a wide range of people enabled me to go it alone … Read more
Crowdfunding is a well-known concept for most people, thanks to sites such as Kickstarter. Headlines of consumer products, such as the Pebble, to films, apps and games getting funded – with no apparent downsides – are everywhere. So when I was asked to write a piece on the "negative" side of crowdfunding, which would be … Read more
My previous post on personal privacy following Prismgate, "My Privacy Plan", sparked a fantastic discussion over on Hacker News. The comment that most resonated with me – and had the most upvotes – questioned what the political aspect of a privacy plan would look like: "My privacy plan will involve learning more about politics. Who … Read more
Before you make the leap, there are some freelance essentials that you should have before you launch your new freelance career. While sometimes boring and time-consuming to set up, the more work you put into getting these essentials set up now, the easier your life will be once you get into the more important aspects … Read more
I’ve written about my reading habits before, using apps like Tweetbot and Pocket as a system for saving interesting content to read later. So when the Cronycle team got in touch to offer me a test drive of their beta product, I was interested enough to take a look and see if it could be … Read more
There’s plenty of posts out there on "How To Learn To Code in Just One Month!", but not a lot for why you should learn to code. One of the problems is that you get articles like this, with the following unhelpful insights into how others have learnt to code: "I slept an average of 5 hours a night, had … Read more
I’ve been looking at the products and services I use as a freelancer, so wanted to get some advice and other opinions on what freelance tools are the best to use. I’ve become a big fan of the Freelance Subreddit, which has a whole community of freelancers, so I asked "What’s your freelance stack?" to … Read more
One of the main things people ask before they go freelance is how to work out their freelance consultant rate. Setting your freelance consultant rates is difficult. Set your day rate too low and you have to work longer and harder to make a decent income. Set your day rate too high and you risk putting … Read more
Last night I went to an event organised by 160characters and the Mobile Entertainment Forum called Sending Out an SMS: Charities Prepare To Go Mobile. Although charities have been slow to pick up the potential offered by mobile the barriers to adoption are crumbling. With a growing number and range of successful case studies, the … Read more