Month: July 2025

đź“… Daily Note: July 25, 2025

I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster:

Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, and find inspiration in past thoughts. It’s also an opportunity to do maintenance, like fix formatting based on new rules in my personal style guide.

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Local Government Association Cyber Incident Grab Bag for Local Authorities – Public Digital.

Along with other public services and businesses, cyber threats pose a significant risk for local authorities. The LGA wanted to provide practical support that could assist councils needing to respond to a serious cyber incident. They also wanted to make sure that the product clearly articulates how cyber security is a team sport, emphasising how a strong response hinges on collective strength.

 

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Is it just me or are other people still putting ‘please’ in their AI prompts?

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On user groups for local government software

Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it?

It seems like vendors are keen to say they have user groups, but then once the sale is made, less keen on convening them.

There’s real advantages in the people actually using software to get together to share insight, issues, collectivise around requests, and so on.

Is there a space, I wonder, for an independent user group as a service offering? Someone to provide a safe place for online discussions, organise regular meet-ups, do a bit of the admin, and maybe engage with the vendors to get them to turn up and so on. Question is probably ‘who pays?’.

Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.

đź“… Daily Note: July 15, 2025

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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

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Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing the Public Internet.

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đź“… Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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