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Lovely to see the new people joining the team in Luton, and introducing themselves on the blog.
Welcome to my old pal Kev Rowe 😀
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Thursday, 5 March, 2026
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Simon Millier from Adur & Worthing Councils reports on progress with open digital planning (Medium warning):
It’s been a busy and productive period for our multi-disciplinary team. As usual we’re balancing the Open Digital Planning project alongside day-to-day business as usual work, and the team has done a commendable job attempting to find time to ensure they remain on top of our work objectives.
Wednesday, 4 March, 2026
As an experiment, relating to some work I’m doing for a customer, I asked Google’s Gemini to do some deep research and write a report about the market for revenues and benefits systems for UK local government.
You can read and comment on what it produced on Google Docs, if you want to. It’s certainly a comprehensive document, although it’s very hard for me to decide what in there is correct or way off beam.
Is this helpful – especially for those councils approaching LGR? I have no idea.
Gazette is a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers.
Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure:
A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to treat these systems as shared infrastructure. This siloed approach fragments systems, making it harder to share or leverage data among public agencies and with the private sector.
What if we treated a set of core digital systems—such as digital IDs, payments, data exchange platforms, credentials, and other shared services that drive core functions across government and the economy—the same way we treat roads or power grids? As essential, long-term, shared systems designed for repeated use.
Monday, 2 March, 2026
The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns.
It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in a service design – also linking them to technical capabilities at the right level of abstraction.
Friday, 27 February, 2026
There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.
Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running:
AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your competitors are already using’, and of course embedded in platforms on which we all depend.
That shift from you can use this to you can’t afford not to happened quickly and without anyone holding a vote.
Thursday, 26 February, 2026
Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms:
Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that ask for the same personal information, and waiting days or even weeks while an overstretched public employee cross-references and shares data across various systems before reaching a decision about our eligibility…
…But what if we could invert this model? What if we could implement a genuinely citizen-centred approach to service design, one built around the principle of instant proof of eligibility and not centralised and repetitive data collection and processing?