These are my links for December 20th through January 7th:

• Doctor Who leads Welsh regeneration | UK news | The Guardian – The success of Doctor Who provided a platform to develop the skills and experience of local people within the industry and then attract further productions to the city [and] region," he said. "The diversity of the landscape is also a significant factor, with beaches and mountains within half an hour of a modern capital that has changed beyond recognition." So successful has Doctor Who been in blazing a drama trail that the BBC has outgrown the programme's dedicated studios in Pontypridd and is proposing to build a "drama village" in the country, possibly in Cardiff Bay.

  Cardiff is considered to be cheaper and more film-friendly than London and will fill in for the streets of the British capital on Sherlock Holmes, a modern take on the Arthur Conan Doyle classic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, being made by Hartswood Films for BBC1.

• NESTA Connect: Human Scale Organisations – Human Scale organisations are fundamentally different in that they:

  1. Tend towards sharing first and inventing second, to create mutual value;
  2. Are honest about the mistakes they’ve made and seek to rectify them quickly;
  3. Know their strengths and weaknesses and so actively seek complementary partners;
  4. Prioritise long term relationships over short term outcomes;
  5. Systematically focus on the macro and the micro.

  via @dominiccampbell

• Summation: Outsourced thinking is today’s biggest problem – Strive to be wrong

  "To be true to yourself, you need to be wrong sometimes. You need to be ok with being wrong and you should be ok when others around you are wrong. That means going against the grain and speaking your mind, especially when it’s different from what those around you are thinking."

• MadLab – Manchester Digital Laboratory – home of creative community technology in Manchester – The Madlab is a community space for people who want to do and make interesting stuff – a place for geeks, artists, designers, illustrators, hackers, tinkerers, innovators and idle dreamers; an autonomous R&D laboratory and a release valve for Manchester's creative communities.
• The state of the UK gov blogosphere – Really good comment from Neil on Dave Brigg post about the problem of us not blogging enough good stuff. Like Steph, my own experience of blogging about my work within Whitehall over the last year and a bit has been that it is *really* difficult. Lack of time is the biggest barrier due both to having a young family and the day job spilling over into evenings and weekends. But this is closely followed by issues around permission and propriety. I’ve felt that I’ve had to restrict what I share and write about more, not less, as time has gone on.

  Which is a real pity – because writing about this stuff online gets me a lot of useful feedback, helps me make contacts which are useful to my employer, makes me reflect more deeply on the value of what I’m doing – ultimately helps motivate me to do the best I can. If it was easier, if I felt safer, if it were encouraged, I’d do it a lot more."

• Hackitude gets down and dirty with data | Be Vocal –