Hi, I’m Dave. I’m a senior manager of digital and IT teams. I specialise in modernising technology delivery within organisations – setting the strategy, putting the programme of work together, organising the team with the right people in the right roles.
This blog is a personal one – I tend to write most days, sharing things I have seen and the occasional thought or opinion. Every so often I send out an email summarising some of these bits.
I publish more considered, longer, polished (and dare I say useful) things on my company blog, Localise.
Right now I am working at Luton Council, and the Local Digital team at MHCLG. I also have some time outside out that contract to pick up bits and pieces of consulting and coaching work.
If you’d like to see my CV, here it is. I have a long and varied experience in local and central government, where I have worked in roles specialising in communications, policy, learning and development and digital, including a stint working on digital engagement at 10 Downing Street.
My passion is for making social change happen, particularly in a local context. In the past I have been chairman of my local parish council, and was on the board of my local Citizens Advice Bureau. I was also chair of governors at a primary school in West Sussex for a bit. Am not currently doing any voluntary stuff, mainly because of a lack of time.
You can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. Also, don’t forget the newsetter!
If you want to get in touch, just ping a note to dave@locali.se.
Colophon
Generally speaking, I like running my own website, on my own domain, using tools I have some kind of control over.
This blog runs on WordPress, hosted on Digital Ocean via SpinupWP.
I edit and publish most of my posts using Marsedit.
It uses the premium version of the Blocksy theme.
I’ve tried to keep plugins and customisation to a minimum. Current plugins installed and running are:
- Akismet – for comment spam. I pay a small amount towards the use of this one.
- Premium Blocksy companion – for theme stuff, this is the paid for version.
- Code Snippets – for the couple of code based tweaks I have made to the site. I use the free version.
- Limit Login Attempts Reloaded – to help reduce brute force attempts to break into the site. I just use the free version.
- SpinupWP – does hidden stuff relating to the hosting environment.
- WP Mail SMTP – enables the sending of email notifications away from the web server (I use Sendlayer). Just using the free version again.
Custom code i have running:
- On the front page of the blog, the date of posts in published once, with all posts published on that date listed under that date. It’s to kind of replicate the look of Dave Winer’s blog.
- Where there are no comments on a post, the Blocksy default text simply reads ‘No comments’ which, while accurate, feels a little neggy. What’s more, for posts with no title, there’s no obvious way for a user to grab the permalink to that single post. So, a tiny bit of code changes the comment text to ‘Permalink’, and removes the #comments anchor in the link.
Both are added to functions.php via the Code Snippets plugin.
If you’re interested in either, let me know and I can send the code over.