Wednesday, 7 October, 2026

Interesting post on the Public Digital blog from Gavin Beckett – Three ways to build intelligence-era digital and tech services in local government:

When we speak to digital, data and technology leaders across the sector, we often hear of the same barrier to delivering change: those trying to introduce modern approaches in local councils spend most of their time having to build their case for change, rather than actually delivering it.

As well as frustrating digital leaders and their teams, this leaves councils poorly equipped to adapt to the rapidly changing political, economic and social landscape of local government.

The world is changing faster than the institutions can. But that does not have to be the case.

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Wednesday, 30 September, 2026

Tuesday, 29 September, 2026

Nice update from Jayvik about the advances the digital team in Luton have been making across the development of their LocalGovDrupal website and low code digital services build.

One interesting development is the establishment of a user research panel, to ensure that the voice of the resident is always present:

We’ve spent time exploring how we can strengthen user research across the council. One approach has been the recent setup of our digital user research panel to help us test ideas, gather feedback and understand how residents really experience our services.

It’s a simple idea that I’ve seen other councils implement, but an important one.

Rather than internal myths, opinions or ‘guesses’ on what residents would do/want, we want to hear directly from them. The more we can place data led insight, evidence directly from the end user alongside SME knowledge, the better our decisions become.

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Friday, 18 September, 2026

Still very light blogging – work is intense at the moment! Good, but intense. But today I came across Fibery – which is like Miro, but crossed with Airtable and already I can think of loads of ways to use this. Well worth checking out.

https://fibery.com/

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Friday, 28 August, 2026

Thanks to Tom Watson’s post about A TechFreedom startup stack, I came across Baserow, which looks like a very well featured, slightly cheaper, open source based alternative to AirTable. Handy!

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Thursday, 27 August, 2026

Just sent round the first LocalGovDigital community email newsletter, which goes to everyone signed up for our new online network 😀

Have a read of the web version to see what you are missing!

If you work in the public sector and have an interest in all things digital in local councils, you can sign up here: https://community.localgov.digital/

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Friday, 14 August, 2026

A lovely time by the sea

Light blogging recently – partly due to starting a new contract, and partly due to the fact that I am just back from a lovely week by the seaside.

Didn’t venture too far, just an hour and a bit down the round to the North Norfolk coast, mostly Sheringham, bit of Cromer (prefer Sheringham).

Was a proper break, barely looked at my phone. Managed to get some reading done too – have been in a real slump of late on that front, and managed to read Straight Man by Richard Russo (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) and Therapy by David Lodge (⭐️⭐️⭐️).

Being by the sea meant we could enjoy the hot weather – when we got back home, inland, the heat really hit us!

#A lovely time by the sea

Wednesday, 5 August, 2026

Coined a new (to me!) phrase today: “performative project management”.

Can see myself using it a lot from now on!

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I love stories like this. Luton’s Hazel Lunn shares the low down on her career in local government, from working in the contact centre to now heading up technology and infrastructure for the Council:

When I first joined local government 23 years ago, I could never have imagined that one day I would become an assistant director of technology and infrastructure. Like many careers in public service, mine did not follow a carefully planned route.

A great read and a fantastic example for anyone just starting out in their career.

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Monday, 3 August, 2026

This looks quite interesting: London Productivity Library.

CleanShot 2026-08-03 at 12.41.26.

A productivity tool from LOTI, for any organisation to deploy. A curated collection of prompts, workflows, productivity tips, and AI assistant how-tos that work with whatever stack your organisation uses.

There is a blog post telling some of the history of it too:

Like most councils, we started with AI prompt training/Lunch & Learns in Croydon. Decent sessions, good attendance, positive feedback forms. And then not much changed. People went back to full inboxes and busy days, and whatever they’d learned about prompt engineering faded before it had a chance to stick.That wasn’t a failure of facilitators or staff, it was the wrong approach for the world we live in today. A housing officer with a backlog of case notes doesn’t want to become a prompt engineer, they just want their Tuesday afternoon back. So we flipped it.

Looks like it is just a prototype at the moment, so could disappear at any time.

I’d be interested to know how helpful folk think this might be. I suppose a lot of it depends on the breadth of the rollout of LLM tools in the organisation – and I’m not sure having a pre-written prompt would go that far in persuading a busy officer to spend time experimenting, if they are already nervous or sceptical?

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Thursday, 30 July, 2026

Another great update on the low code platform rollout at Luton, from Kev Rowe:

A key principle of our low code platform approach is to build reusable components that can support multiple services.

Over the last two sprints, James Coleman, Senior Digital Developer, has introduced several new platform patterns, including:

  • enhanced filtered list functionality within back-office interfaces, making it easier for users to see which cases require actions
  • integrated PDF viewing within portal applications, allowing documents to be viewed directly without requiring downloads
  • continued work towards a more accessible HTML-based document experience, ensuring we improve accessibility while providing a practical interim solution through integrated document viewing

These patterns help us develop new applications more quickly while providing a more consistent user experience across the platform.

Following this journey is such a good learning resource for other councils about to embark on similar work!

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Wednesday, 29 July, 2026

Sucharitha Revanuru from the Essex Digital Service team writes From Bananas to Better Outcomes: Taking Product Thinking to the LGD Community:

Like many digital teams, one of our biggest lessons has been learning to balance stakeholder requests with genuine user needs. Sometimes the challenge is not building quickly but making sure we are solving the right problem first. This is where discovery, prioritisation and continuous feedback become so important.

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I don’t know why I enjoy aggressively sceptical posts about AI so much, but I do. Here’s a doozy: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making:

There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier).

It’s full of such zingers.

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Tuesday, 28 July, 2026

Matt Cain – The Architecture of Effective Digital Government Centres:

Over the last eighteen months a distinct cohort of governments has produced fast measurable gains in digital government. These aren’t “just” against international rankings (the biennial UN Index will be refreshed this autumn), but by governments that have delivered digital services at scale for most citizens. This note examines how the digital centres of six of those governments — Greece, the Philippines, Brazil, Japan, Ukraine and Malaysia — are actually constructed: where responsibility for digital sits, how senior and how well-sponsored the person holding it is, and, above all, the mechanism by which that centre can compel consistency from the rest of government.

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Ronan Fitzgerald on the Justice Digital, Data and Science blog writes How user research transformed GOV.UK guidance for separating families:

Thousands of people use guidance on child arrangements every month, often at some of the most stressful moments in their lives.

We wanted to find out whether it still met people’s needs, and what we could do to improve it.

In September 2024, I formed a content improvement team with another content designer and a user researcher, focused on Private Family Law content on GOV.UK. This is how JDDS approaches digital services more widely, bringing different skills together around a single user problem rather than working in separate lanes.

Our goal was to revamp live content and user journeys based on regular user research. We wanted to understand our users and their needs in detail, while showing the value of improving content that is already live.

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Monday, 27 July, 2026

TPX Impact have published a “Market-shaping playbook for policymakers”:

Market-shaping is the practice of designing and delivering interventions that make a public service market produce better outcomes. Services like planning, housing management, social care and education are powered by markets, including technology and other service providers. When buyers experience vendor lock-in, can’t access their own data, or can’t access the products and services they need to deliver well, interventions like collective buying powers, data standards, regulatory guidance and training are needed.

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Kailani Knight – The Certainty Principles:

Accessibility work often feels chaotic. Every new project seems to start from scratch. Every person who flags a barrier is treated like a unique puzzle to solve. The result is slow, expensive, exhausting – and it still results in solutions that fail people.

In my day to day I notice more and more that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Beneath the surface noise, there are constants – Patterns that repeat, needs that are knowable in advance and systems that can learn.

This Certainty Principles series names these constants and gives you a framework to act on them. It’s for anyone who’s tired of reinventing the wheel every time inclusion comes up – and for anyone who wants to move their organisation from reactive firefighting to quiet, dependable competence.

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Thursday, 23 July, 2026

On the MHCLG Digital blog – Building Local Transcribe for local government:

Local Transcribe is a new AI-powered tool designed to change that by capturing conversations, transcribing and summarising them, and producing a draft set of case notes for officers to review and edit…

It builds on Minute, developed by the Incubator for AI (i.AI) and piloted with 22 councils using real case data. We’re taking what worked and evolving it into a scalable service for wider use across local government, starting with housing.

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Wednesday, 22 July, 2026