Dave

Dave

  • Joined: January 6, 2026
  • Articles: 3240
  • Comments: 519

The Government has announced the shape of the latest batch of new unitary councils across the county: Gloucestershire: 7 councils being reorganised into 1 unitary. This will unite the Gloucester-Cheltenham growth corridor and Golden Valley cyber cluster under one council,…

Macrows is a desktop Airtable clone for the Mac. It’s nice!

An open working masterclass from Cumberland Council: Running a show and tell? ✅ Recording it so others can watch it? ✅ Publishing it on your intranet? ✅ The area of the intranet that anyone on the web can access? ✅…

WhatCable is a simple, free Mac app to tell you wha the USB-C cable is that you have plugged in. Can it carry data? How much wattage is it capable of? WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and…

LOTI is 7 years old and Eddie rightly celebrates, and also teases about the future: That’s why LOTI is now planning its most ambitious initiative to date: to establish a Centre for New Public Services. The aim is to give…

Cathy Dutton – The portal trap: When portals are treated as containers they fail. You can’t cover up the complexity, and attempting to do so just adds another layer of abstraction and frustration. If portals are instead built as a…

Have been using Dropover this week, and it’s great. A Mac app that pops up a little shelf for you to drop whatever you are currently dragging onto, so you can then find the place you want to permanently drop…

Laura points to this post on how to build a community calendar, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. I wonder if some of it would be useful for the ORUK crowd? But the choice of technology quickly becomes secondary…

As if by magic, the mighty Will has also posted on improving local government software today, and I heartily recommend you taking a few minutes out to read what he has to say. Rather than cover every possible market shaping…

Steve Messer – Is testing and learning a methodology or a core skill?: Experimentation and adaption is only mentioned in the Agile and Lean section, and only in the context of ways of working. But testing & learning is a…

New resource on the digital LGR playbook – Priorities at each phase of reorganisation: This resource sets out common phases councils that have been through LGR have experienced. It is not a mandated timeline and does not replace the wider…

My work at Luton is done

I’m just finishing up my work with Luton Council. It’s been a great experience, and I feel I’ve learned a load along the way, whilst really helping catalyse the shift there to a modern digital service. I worked for between…

Tom Loosemore – Prompt injection and the perils of leaving it to AI to handle AI: A petition filed to a Brazilian labour court contained hidden instructions for any AI used by the court to contest the petition only superficially,…

Tinydot looks like a fun little service. A Mac app sits on your computer watching a folder. Anything you put into that folder appears on your Tinydot site, as if by magic! Markdown files, photos, etc all work. No idea…

Matt Billingsley from Content Design London – What 6 FOI requests reveal about government campaign websites: Departments treated these websites as communications products rather than services, which meant they did not need to meet GOV.UK’s Service Standard. The MoJ said…

Am off work next week and planning to take a proper break. Back on 6th July – see you on the other side!

The worst council website I have ever seen

I’ve been doing this job now for what feels like an awfully long time. As I’ve said before, sometimes I get cranky having to have the same conversations with people about issues I really thought we had all resolved in…

Stephen Mounsey on standards: That matters because some constraints are good constraints. They protect the basics. They stop us reinventing things we do not need to reinvent. They make it easier to reuse what already works. They can create pace,…