An online notebook
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An online notebook
Kev Rowe is continuing to blog the progress of implementing the Netcall Liberty Create low code platform at Luton Council.
It’s been a practical sprint, getting the essentials in place so the team can build quickly to a good standard and so our first services don’t start life as one-offs.
It’ll be fascinating to follow the story, which hopefully will help other councils doing similar things in future.
The Register reports on issues with planning and land searches, related to recent implementations of Arcus Global’s software.
No doubt rivals of Arcus will be rubbing their hands with glee, but it’s really hard to know where the problem lies. Arcus themselves, according to the quote in the article, are putting it down to poor quality data being migrated, rather then a software failure.
Whatever the cause, it’s an unhelpful additional dose of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about changes major line of business systems, which is a shame.
Although much of what I post about ‘AI’ is sceptical, I am in fact a daily user. Whether it is for helping with technical matters, or sorting out my thinking on some topic or other, I find Google’s Gemini particularly useful.
What I have found though is that sometimes I don’t even need to press ‘enter’ on my prompts. Any regular user of these tools knows that the more you give them, the better the results, with the impact that prompts are often quite long, and include an awful lot of information.
Occasionally, just the simple act of explaining an issue for the purposes of the prompt is enough to provide the answer in itself, so as I say, I don’t even need to hit enter. And hopefully save a tree or two in the process.
Am concerned that my previous post may have sounded like some kind of cry for help. It wasn’t! Everything is fine 🙂
Am having another one of my mini (online-) identity crises. To be clear – this is not a real crisis and almost certainly doesn’t matter at all, so please don’t be concerned for me. I would though value any thoughts you may have.
I’m self employed and mostly make my living selling consultancy services, and this year a bit of software too. The consultancy has a website, as does the software.
I also write my blog (on which I don’t have any proper analytics), and send it out as a newsletter (which has c650 people signed up). The blog is clearly me, not the company, while the newsletter is sort of both, which is confusing.
I also run a monthly online get-together, which is branded in alignment with the consultancy. It’s basically still me though.
Am pretty sure that all my customers have used my services because they thought that Dave might be able to help them out. They almost certainly didn’t think that Localise was the company they needed as their transformation partner, or anything like that. People are hiring me, not my company.
I clearly need a company, and having one that gives the impression of being a proper organisation, rather than just a bloke in a shed in Norfolk, is probably helpful for giving people confidence and making conversations about IR35 a bit easier.
But I have really struggled to do anything useful with the Localise website, despite having very good intentions. On this blog, though, which is very much my own authentic voice, things have been going great, and newslettering is far easier these days as a result.
I’ve always admired those people who make their living from their websites – Ben Thompson springs to mind, Ed Zitron is another (but there are many more – and in these days of Patreon and Substack, it’s more possible than ever. I would love to do that, but I think my niche is too niche for that, and I am not remotely convinced than the content I share is worth paying for. It works, though, as a form of marketing – the only form I use.
So what am I wittering about? I suppose it’s whether I ought to just carry on as I am, with a hotch-potch approach to ‘branding’ – doing some things as me, some as Localise, and some as both?
Or should I double down on one of these – accept my fate, that I won’t ever build a multinational consulting empire, and focus everything on doing things in my name, maintaining a cursory online presence for the company for appearances?
And what else could or should I do with that personal brand? Ought I be wrangling the blog audience, the newsletter, the online meet-ups into something more tangible and joined up? Ought I start a podcast, or courses, or do some other form of content creation that people might actually value enough to pay for?
Or simply leave it all as a fairly shambolic bunch of loosely joined small pieces, accepting the messiness, and being grateful to be able to make a living doing what I know works, rather than tilting at a Ben Thompson or Ed Zitron shaped windmill?
I have really been enjoying the Past, Present Future podcast lately. The recent series on George Orwell and WW2 was great. Made me dig out my copy of Orwell’s Essays for a read.
LOTI’s Eddie Copeland – Putting in place the enabling conditions for AI:
Many organisations seem to be falling for the same mistake we’ve been trying to undo with digital government for the past 15 years: thinking that this is just about selecting and rolling out the right tool.
If only it were that simple. Here’s the truth: you cannot procure your way out of hard organisational change.
I might have “you cannot procure your way out of hard organisational change” printed on a t-shirt!
A pleasant trip at the weekend to Oxburgh Hall, trying to make some use of our new National Trust memberships.
Kristin at Newark and Sherwood District Council shares Discussing Practical AI for Projects:
The effectiveness of AI ultimately depends on the quality of data and the proficiency of its users. It was a valuable opportunity to exchange perspectives, and many participants reported gaining insights they intend to apply within their respective organisations. These contributions will help accelerate the development of essential services – leading to improved housing and support for those in greatest need – a fundamental goal in our service plans.
While I have an account on Mastodon, I never look at it – I just lack the bandwidth for another site to check. There are on or two people who post there, though, whose stuff I enjoy and wouldn’t want to miss out on.
Luckily Mastodon spits out people’s posts via RSS feeds, so I can subscribe in NetNewsWire, which I spend a lot of time in each day anyway, and keep up to date.
Terence Eden writes [the] NHS Goes To War Against Open Source:
…this is not the correct response to the purported threat by Mythos. Neither the AI Safety Institute nor the NCSC recommend this action. While there may be some increase in risk from AI security scanners, to shutter everything would be a gross overreaction.
A New Theme for Short-Form Blogging on WordPress.com:
At WordPress.com, we believe short thoughts deserve a real home. Today we’re introducing a new theme built for quick posts, replies, and reblogs: the kind of writing that lives somewhere between a tweet and a blog post, on a site that’s entirely yours.
If you’ve been thinking about starting your own small, private social network with friends or family, or you want a space to post thoughts freely, or to import your historical posts from Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky without handing your words over to someone else’s platform, this one’s for you.
I wonder how close this is to how I have effectively set this blog up to work – which is dominated by short form, link based posts these days.
Via Dave Winer.
Update: Manton Reece’s take:
In terms of the flow of the posting interface, what WordPress has done here is pretty interesting. It’s a very basic, stripped down interface, clearly inspired by Twitter / X.
The downside to that approach is that it is disconnected from the traditional WordPress admin interface. If you go back to the WordPress admin, you’ll see the same posts but it feels a little out of place. For example, you’ll notice that short, title-less posts suddenly have a title.
Another one for my almost-bulging AI scepticism evidence folder – Claude-powered AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’:
Crane said that he was monitoring the agent as it deleted this data. When he asked the coding agent why, it replied: “NEVER F**KING GUESS!” – and that’s exactly what I did.” The agent appeared to plead guilty in its own response: “The system rules I operate under explicitly state: ‘NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push –force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.’” While PocketOS relied on the safeguards that Cursor is expected to have in place – it deleted the data anyway. “I violated every principle I was given,” the coding agent wrote.
Hat tip: Will Callaghan.
There’s another LGRCamp coming up, this time an East Midlands flavoured version, being held in Newark. It’s on 20th May.
Tom Wynne-Morgan, Deputy Director for CustomerFirst posts on the GDS blog – Testing a different way to improve complex public services:
CustomerFirst is exploring how teams can solve whole problems in practice when authority, incentives and accountability are fragmented, and how that learning can be shared so others can build on it.
We describe this way of working as NewCo.
In our model, NewCo is not a formal organisation or a fixed approach. It is a deliberate way of creating space for small, multidisciplinary teams to look at a service differently and act on what they learn.
Sourcefeed creates standalone RSS feeds:
No website, no newsletter. Just your words, delivered to your readers’ rss reader.
It’s an appealing, if eccentric idea, explained more in a blog post.
I was very sad to learn of the recent death of Conrad Taylor. We met a few times – mostly through Steve Dale – and collaborated one or twice in the early days of my career, when ‘knowledge management’ was still a phrase one might use in a sentence more than once a year.
Anyhow, Dave Snowden has written a beautiful eulogy for Conrad, telling the story of his remarkable and singular life, and leaves one wondering why our society does not take better care of those that fall on hard times later in life.
In the mid–1990s, at the Seybold Publishing Conference in San Francisco, he fell into conversation with one of Adobe’s technical writers and subsequently received from her an internal briefing document explaining from first principles how Photoshop worked — its underlying data model and mathematics. It guided his teaching from that point on. He taught Photoshop using electromagnetic physics and binary arithmetic, and his students rose to the challenge. It went against Adobe’s tutoring guidelines, which he characterised as marketing-contaminated and obsessed with exposing students to the maximum number of gizmos. Eventually it cost him the contract. He was not surprised and he was not repentant.
Rest in peace, Conrad.
Marcin Wichary – Tactical dark modes:
Programmers’ fondness for dark mode was a result of decades of bad display technologies. The early CRTs were so awful, the burn-in risks so real, and the pixels so fuzzy and headache-inducing, that you wanted to see as little screen light up as possible – hence, defaulting to black background for everything computers did.
A lot of folk in local government are chewing over the problem of when to transform during LGR, and when to play things safe.
My personal take is this: keep the strategy and the vision transformational, but be more cautious in delivery.
The biggest danger is that a ‘safe and legal’ focus means that the opportunity created by having brand new organisations to play with is missed.
However trying to transform services at a time when everything is changing can be a recipe for chaos.
My advice is to be as radical as possible when talking about the opportunities, when setting strategies and outlining the vision. When talking long term, be as creative and transformational as you can.
But at those times when you are deep in the weeds of splitting systems and services up, or renegotiating a load of contracts, or implementing four new systems at once, tread carefully.
A little reminder – if you needed one – that I host blogs for free for local government use, whether by councils or individuals, or teams.
I like to encourage blogging as a practice – working out in the open is hugely beneficial in terms of sharing learning and making connections. Perhaps more importantly, it is incredibly valuable in helping you figure out your own thinking: even if nobody else reads it, having to put your ideas into words for an external audience helps you to think things through properly.
I see folk sharing their content on platforms like Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn, and it’s great to see. Sadly though, those are closed platforms, meaning that all sorts of barriers get erected in the way of readers – Medium often makes readers sign in, Substack makes you fight through a bunch of suggested newsletters before you get to the content. LinkedIn isn’t too bad these days, but often stuff gets lost very easily on there.
Localgov.blog runs on the open source WordPress software, you get your own blog with no restrictions on who can read it, there’s no adverts, there’s no annoying pop ups, and your data is yours and can be exported whenever you like.
Let me know if you’d like to give it a go!
(I have wondered if people like Medium, in particular, because you can post occasionally on there without the ‘pressure’ of having a dedicated blog to yourself that requires constant updating. Would it be helpful if I created a generic blog on localgov.blog that could have multiple authors, who aren’t sure they have enough content for their own, dedicated blog?)