Dave

📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more:

Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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📅 Daily Note: September 23, 2025

Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team:

We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or capability is limited.

With local government reorganisation, new unitary authorities will need to consolidate systems, migrate data, and harmonise business processes at an unprecedented scale. This will also impact technology contracts and procurement activities.

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Foundational Specification to support the procurement of social care Case Management Systems:

The Department of Health and Social Care has released a Foundational Specification to support the procurement of social care Case Management Systems (CMSs). Developed in partnership with BetterGov, the Specification is the outcome of a multi-stage consultation process involving a wide range of stakeholders. Its primary aim is to simplify the procurement journey for Local Authorities by providing a clear and consistent guide—helping to reduce the time, cost, and resources required when selecting new CMSs.

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Endel – via Matt Mullenweg – is an interesting idea, offering “[p]ersonalized soundscapes to help you focus, relax, and sleep. Backed by neuroscience.”

I definitely work better when I have the right music playing – but ÂŁ60 is too steep when i already have Apple Music and a bunch of suitable playlists identified.

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Why WordPress Lost the Cool Kids (And How to Win Them Back):

Here’s what nobody talks about: WordPress is actually modern. REST API, GraphQL, headless implementations, React-based editing. It powers complex applications and handles millions of visitors. But everyone still thinks it’s “just for blogs.”

The platform regularly outperforms competitors on speed, but gets labeled as “slow and bloated.” Enterprise teams at Sony and Microsoft chose WordPress deliberately—these aren’t legacy installations.

WordPress has Full Site Editing and visual builders that compete with Webflow. They just feel hidden behind confusing historical interfaces.

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Another newsletter sent. Am pleased to be getting back into a fortnightly rhythm.

Some delivery issues though, need to have a look at my DNS records to ensure I have them set correctly.

If you’d like to sign up, you can do so!

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It isn’t altogether obvious how to send an email to the attendees of an upcoming Zoom meeting, without exporting their details and sending a normal email, which seems sub-optimal.

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The core problem in local government digital is capacity

This is the content of the ‘article’ element of the email newsletter I sent last week. Publishing here for posterity.

2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year in local government digital, largely due to the impact of the Localism bill in late 2024 and the imminent (and indeed immanent) prospect of local government reorganisation. Following the latest cabinet reshuffle, it feels like the ambitions might be being dialled back a little (note: I have no special insight other than what I read online), which probably isn’t a bad thing.
I can’t help but feel that some kind of coming together is required if the sector is to get the most out of the digital opportunity. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in several research projects in the last year looking at some of the the big picture stuff, and to me the issue of capacity seems to be screaming out as the fundamental issue facing council digital teams across the country.
  • Local government software is largely terrible because nobody has the time to put the effort into demanding and buying something better.
  • Local government data is in a poorly maintained mess because nobody has the time to sort it out.
  • Local government websites are still full of unintelligible content and PDF forms because nobody has the time to get round to fixing it.
I could go on (but don’t have the time, LOL!) but you get my point – many of the oft-cited root causes of digital incompetence actually have a root cause themselves – capacity.
Have hundreds of councils trying to do the same thing, over and over again, is nuts, and there could have been some potential in using the LGR process to create some scalable teams to deal with the issue. Trouble is, LGR itself creates so much work that I dare say the opportunity wouldn’t be realised for some time.
I wrote a thing last autumn about how councils could start sharing digital, data, and technology capabilities in a way that doesn’t impact local policy setting or require huge sector-wide reform projects. Shared services have a bad rep in the sector, but it doesn’t have to be that way if we do things properly and take our time.
If LGR doesn’t end up happening as widely as once was expected, it would be nice to think that some of the conversations that have started up between digital people could still result in sharing capabilities, reducing burdens, and increasing capacity across the sector.

📅 Daily Note: September 18, 2025

Giles Turnbull: The strategy is enquiry

What I’m suggesting is a new approach for the times when there’s a perceived need for a document called a “strategy”. It shouldn’t be a document full of “we will”; it should be a website full of “what we’re learning”.

Use it to demonstrate your institutional capability to test and learn, to enquire and be curious.

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Key learnings from GOV.UK One Login discovery research for local government:

Key themes emerging from the research include:

  • cost savings are essential – councils told us this would be critical to secure leadership buy-in
  • identity verification is a USP – councils value secure verification and the potential to share credentials across local and central government
  • suppliers are open to integration – many are already using, or moving towards, OpenID Connect (OIDC) compatibility
  • forward thinking but stretched – councils want to future-proof systems, but limited resources, capability, and competing priorities are barriers
  • user adoption risks – concerns about digital exclusion, resident trust, and the transitioning of users to a new system

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Dave Winer, It’s really simple:

FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, it’s a real editor that supports all the features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. How could they miss that? Markdown is like MP3. If you’re mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It’s there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you’re mixing text you’re mixing Markdown.

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Really Simple Licensing – “The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet”.

RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation.

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Avoiding the hidden costs of leadership debt – Oli Lovell, Public Digital:

Technical debt is well recognised. But the same logic of ever-shifting organisational needs – and therefore the debt accrued by standing still – applies to leadership too. As a leader, your skills, models and culture operate as a system of their own, determining how well your organisation is able to adapt and respond to change.

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Decision making at the right level with Hats, Haircuts and Tattoos by Emily Webber:

What I like about these definitions is that they provide a framework for considering a decision, while also allowing for the differences and nuances of the situation and the experience of the people making them.

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This is a fair challenge:

i know its a lot easier to book the same recurring slot every fortnight / month

but its quite depressing seeing group after group you never get to attend, because they always meet on your non working day 😔

I did the lazy thing with Localise Live! but probably should have mixed it up a bit more. I will be making recordings available to people who sign up, so maybe I need to make it clearer that people should sign up even if they can’t make the meetings, so they get that access…

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David Gerrard – UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI

The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

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How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash:

There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done” ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions.

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James Plunkett writes What does digital-era healthcare really mean?

When the UK government published its 10 Year Plan for Health two months ago, there was general support for its direction of travel: shifting from analogue to digital, from hospitals to communities, and from treatment to prevention.

The question people asked is whether the healthcare system has the capability to deliver these shifts. Or, put more bluntly, ‘we’ve heard this all before, so why is this time different?’

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