Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather
We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as vital skills for leadership
Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing the Public Internet.
📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025
Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service.
Ben Holliday: New ways of organising:
What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard to point to places that we can truly call service organisations, at least outside of individual policy areas or transformation programmes.
Jukesie – The Open Continuum:
Working in the open can seem scary and a bit all or nothing. I suspect I do not help with this with my stories of the extreme ups and downs of the practice and certainly there is some risk…not as much as is often feared but it is there.
Being open is not one size fits all though. There are levels to it and significant benefits at each of them – plus you build your muscles, instincts and a thicker skin if you work your way up to going all-out.
On ‘the single view of the customer’
“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway.
‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue with when uttered with confidence. But just the slightest digging under the surface reveals a plethora of issues, whether technology, governance, ethics, data quality, affordability… the list goes on.
If anyone offers to sell you a single view of the customer for anything less than many millions of pounds, and needing at least 5 years to get working, then they are fibbing.
Instead, try bringing together the data you need about a certain type of customer, for a particular use case. All the debtors, for example. Then see if you or your software can spot trends or commonalities in that. You don’t need ALL the customer data to be able to make a difference, and trying to do so will slow you down so much that you’ll end up making no impact at all.
Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.
📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025
Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”.
In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.
How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!
Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).
James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself
I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.
These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken. They’re just saying that the problem runs deep — that it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.
If that’s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.
Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.
Content Restrictor WordPress plugin
For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis.
There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability at writing WordPress code.
The result is Content Restrictor – and it works very nicely for my needs:
- Pages and posts have a check box – should this be restricted or not?
- Each user page now has a section with a list of all the restricted pages, and if checked, that user can view the content, else they get a message
- The message can be customised in the settings
- There’s also a short code to display all the restricted pages that the current user has access to
- Admins accounts bypass the restrictions entirely
If it works for you tool, feel free to grab it from GitHub!