Friday, 24 April, 2026

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?)

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Interesting case study published by the LGA about Nottingham City Council – Embedding a culture of change through targeted team support:

This case study explores how Nottingham City Council is embedding a culture of change through the in-house delivered Ways of Working (WoW) programme, a targeted support programme to help teams adapt to new ways of working and embed sustainable change.

By using a structured diagnostic process, designing tailored interventions and working collaboratively with service areas, the programme is helping teams improve their effectiveness, strengthen alignment with the Council’s values and behaviours, and adapt to evolving digital and operational demands.

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John Gruber on AI:

Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.

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Wednesday, 22 April, 2026

Guidance from the ICO on AI and freedom of information requests:

Information requests often involve secondary correspondence, such as clarification or internal reviews. If requesters use AI to read and respond, it can result in long, complex emails. These take valuable time for practitioners to process and understand.

We appreciate that resources are already stretched for many organisations. This guidance is intended to reassure practitioners that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) can accommodate requesters who use developing technology. The existing FOI principles are generally capable of dealing with the impact of AI being used increasingly in this area.

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A fun long-ish read from the makers of the iA writer app on Europe’s desire to move away from Microsoft Office and what it might take:

Severance illustrates something so familiar that it’s hard both to recognize and hard to ignore: Fluorescent light. Endless hallways. Ritualized procedures. People performing point-and-click tasks on screens whose purpose they cannot fully explain. And everyone behaves as if the system were natural. It’s both weirdly old and claustrophobically on brand. Sounds familiar? Severance beautifully illustrates how it feels using Microsoft Office all day long, in 2026.

At Lumon, they circle and click numbers whose meaning they cannot see. In Office, we click and circle numbers whose basis we hardly question. A spreadsheet cell feels objective. A chart feels authoritative. The grid replaces doubt. The format replaces understanding. The brand identity makes it right.

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Jens Gemmel shares a substantial post with some really good, interesting in depth thinking around the potential for LGR to be used as a level for wider, system level change (LinkedIn warning):

When we are talking about Sussex LGR, what we are seeing on the surface is a discussion about geography, governance and structure, shaped by ministerial direction and the emerging preference for a two-unitary model. Those discussions provide direction, they create a framework for decision-making and they bring a level of clarity to what is otherwise a complex and evolving landscape.

Yet underneath that surface sits something far more consequential, because what is taking shape is not simply a reorganisation of councils, but a reconfiguration of an entire system that connects services, people, data, infrastructure and value across place. The decisions being made now will determine how that system behaves, how demand flows through it, how pressure builds or is prevented, and how effectively Sussex is able to respond to the needs of its residents over the long term.

I don’t disagree with what Jens says. I’m cautious about whether the timing is right – LGR feels like a crunch time where every spare scrap of resource is going to be spent on just keeping the wheels on the road.

Perhaps these ideas will be revisited once the dust has settled – although that would be a missed opportunity. Using a time of change to change in the right way seems an obvious thing to do – but people are going to be so stretched, I’m not sure it will be possible.

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The latest resource in the Local Government Reorganisation Digital and Cyber Playbook has been published – Digital and cyber leadership during transition:

Research by the Local Government Association (LGA) is clear that strong, early and visible leadership is one of the biggest success factors for local government reorganisation (LGR). A lack of leadership represents a clear risk to delivery.

LGR places significant demands on digital and cyber leadership. New organisations must operate safely from day one, while at the same time planning for several years of transformation.

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I’ve been playing around a bit with Gitbook to see if it would be a good fit for a publishing itch I need to scratch. I ended up tearing my (somewhat limited) hair out over it – I don’t think I’ve ever used a technology so wilfully obscure!

What I really wanted was a means of writing markdown documents on my laptop, which with as little fuss as possible I could publish as simple webpages.

In the end I went with Obsidian Publish. I don’t really mind what editor I use, and Obsidian is easy enough to configure to look and feel how I like it. What’s most important is that publishing the content is a simple case of clicking a couple of buttons.

The results are a nice, simple set of pages with a structured table of contents on the left hand side – perfect.

It does cost a few quid a month, but I figured it’s worth it for the convenience.

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Tuesday, 21 April, 2026

Lovely story in the Guardian about the making of the 8-bit classic game Chuckie Egg:

The iconic game that came to define 8-bit programming still conjures flutters of nostalgia 40 years on – all thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester.

Can remember spending many a lunchtime at school, hunched over a BBC Micro playing this game!

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Monday, 20 April, 2026

Useful reminder from dxw about the potential for things to go wrong on WordPress sites – in this case, a change of ownership for a suite of plugins.

In August 2025 the new owner planted a backdoor in the purchased plugins and in 5–6 April 2026 the backdoor was weaponised, by planting malware in sites that had the plugins installed. On 7 April the WordPress Plugins Team permanently closed all essentialplugin plugins, and on 8 April, the day we opened the incident at dxw, WordPress pushed an update to the plugins which removed the malicious code.

Of course, things can go wrong with any technology platform and the key is staying vigilant. Sounds like the whole WordPress community mobilised pretty quickly to shut the threat down.

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Saturday, 18 April, 2026

Like most people, I don’t often need to interact with my local council, and so – given the way I make a living – I tend to take notice when I do.

Recently we got an email with an invoice on it from the council to renew our garden waste bin subscription. I remember that when I ordered it originally I had open an account on the council website, so I went to log into that to process the renewal.

Of course, having clicked to login to my account, I was then asked which my account I wanted – the one for council tax or the one for everything else. I chose everything else and once I had reset my password, logged in.

On logging in, the only thing I could do was order another garden waste bin. My account did not know that I had one.

Instead, to pay the invoice, I had to leave the my account section, go to ‘make a payment’ and enter the details (account number, invoice number, my address, even my email address) from the invoice manually to pay by card.

To avoid this in future, I would need to phone the council – no options to set up a garden waste direct debit online, whether on my account or not.

Just this simple, highly transactional, example shows how far we still have to go. This isn’t a complex service like social care or SEND or housing. Despite having the technology for an account, doing simple things with it are still not possible.

It’s pretty pathetic.

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Friday, 17 April, 2026

The National Digital Exchange is a really neat idea that is looking more and more impressive.

Basically, it’s a way to try out local government software – often open source – without needing to buy it first or run costly proof of concept projects.

Effectively, you choose a tool and then it is automagically spun up for you in a temporary bit of Amazon cloud.

Some of the tools available to try include:

  • LocalGovDrupal
  • Back Office Planning System
  • FixMyStreet
  • LocalGov Income Management System
  • Simply Readable (AI-powered document translation)

It’s a brilliant idea and a great way to showcase open source solutions for the sector.

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Thursday, 16 April, 2026

Will Callaghan is on a bit of a blogging roll at the moment. Here he is on Kickstarting collaboration during LGR:

Of the speakers, the stand out two for me were Kate Hurr and Madeline Hoskin, of Cumberland and North Yorkshire Councils respectively. They’ve both been through LGR relatively recently, and shared practical hard won advice.

Both argue that councils need to collaborate more, particularly through LGR. We’re all meeting the same needs, there’s very little about our organisations that is unique. I totally agree. The questions for me are: what barriers exist to collaboration over the next few years, and how can we remove them?

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Wednesday, 15 April, 2026

I had the thought the other day that an awful lot of time gets wasted in local government digital because of the constant cycle of probably unnecessary change.

Here’s an example: new chief digital person comes in, and the first thing they want to do is to impose themselves, so new strategy, often new tech, new approaches and ways of working etc.

Now obviously everyone feels justified in doing this. Frankly, if I were to get a new job running digital in a council, it’s the first thing I would do!

But it is usually a waste of time. I heard the other day about a council who have brought in a new interim CDO type person and the first thing they are doing is to get rid of one digital platform to replace it with another. It just so happens to be the one that was previously canned to make way for the current one!

Put like that, it seems very silly, and a lot of work and time for no real obvious improvement. After all, a team might spend 18 months or 2 years migrating from one platform to another, to be in basically the same position as before, only on different tech.

Trying to put a stop to it, though, is really challenging. Perhaps this is, again, an argument for a bit less local autonomy in individual councils when it comes to choosing technology. If all the time, energy and money spent on cycling through different options every 5 years was instead invested in improving shared platforms, we probably would make a lot more progress.

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Tuesday, 14 April, 2026

GDS Local have published the first iteration of their architecture for (digital) local government.

It looks at this stage like very high level, simplified enterprise architecture.

It will be interesting to see where it goes next. I worry about architecture being done for its own sake, and so understanding what the outcome this will help achieve is going to be key.

Phil’s accompanying blog post helps with some of that:

It makes it easier to describe applications, integrations, data and underlying capabilities, regardless of which products are in use. That supports clearer conversations with suppliers, internal governance groups, and central government. It also makes dependencies and risks easier to see.

For me there are two pragmatic outcomes that make sense here.

One develops the shared language thing further, translating between technology design and service design, so conversations can be had by both sides with everyone understanding what the others are referring to.

I think that probably lies in connecting this kind of technology architecture with service patterns, such as those being worked on in Wales.

Secondly, I wonder if the nailing down of a common language and definitions of what digital gubbins councils need to deliver their services might lead to interesting conversations about the delivery of that gubbins, and where capacity could be created in the sector by sharing a lot of the stuff that doesn’t really matter to most people. More on that in this post from ages ago.

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Am super impressed with the way Doug is using AI tools to help him build useful software. Commonplace is a way of saving online stuff into collections. It’s a bit like Delicious of old.

What’s more, browsing through the collections others have created, I have already found a few useful things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise: Heynote, a simple ‘scratchpad’ style text editor; and Joplin, an open source everything-bucket like Evernote or my current choice DEVONthink.

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Monday, 13 April, 2026

I sent out a newsletter for the first time in ages today. It’s a simple dump of the last week’s blog posts from here.

Since I put in place the Jetopack-driven email subscription feature, precisely one person signed up, so it didn’t feel like the right way to do things. I’ll be disabling that shortly.

For some reason, people like a proper newsletter! I have a decent enough list of email addresses on the old Daveslist newsletter, which I used for this new blog based format. Will see what people make of it!

If you aren’t signed up, you can do so.

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Richard Pope: Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services:

The principles of what makes a well-designed service remain the same as in the pre-AI digital era. AI should be treated as a design material rather than as a product in its own right. The goal of introducing AI into services should not be to create new “AI services”, but to make services work better for users.

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Not come across LOTI’s service innovation cards before, but they are lovely and would be really interested to learn about how it plays out in a workshop setting.

It reminds me somewhat of the good old days of the social media and digital engagement games (that post is full of broken links, apologies, but I think you can get the drift) that David Wilcox, Steph Gray, and I used to run. I have often thought about what a digital transformation version might look like, and I suspect it isn’t a million miles away from what Eddie and the team have done here.

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