Dave

📅 Daily Note: November 25, 2025

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Katherine Wastell – Every organisation has some madness:

If everyone spots the problems but no one takes responsibility, things will only get worse. Accountability is the difference between taking a step forward and staying stuck. It takes one brave team to break the cycle.

Full of great insight (via Ben Unsworth).

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Polly Mackenzie – Iconoplastic – a made up word for an important idea:

In other words, it’s not just bureaucracies that resist innovation. It’s innovation that resists bureaucracies. Proof if you need it: a few months ago I had the privilege of attending a conference on the government’s (great) Test Learn and Grow programme, designed to accelerate place-based public service reform. The word ‘Grow’ was missing from half the slides in the presentation.

(via Ben Unsworth)

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Ross Ferguson – An appreciative review of the ‘refreshed’ Digital Strategy for Scotland:

What is good are the references to improving capability in the civil service and not just capacity. The focus is not just about technical skills, but maturity, confidence, and application of digital tooling and ways of working generally across the workforce. Shared approaches, targeted support, and leadership as well as delivery capabilities will all benefit the holistic approach that is needed.

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“CivTech is a Scottish Government programme that brings the public, private and third sectors together to build things that make people’s lives better.”

(via Ross Ferguson)

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📅 Daily Note: November 10, 2025

Dafydd Singleton – User needs for data standards.

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Dafydd Vaughan – The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture’ won’t ever deliver:

I’ve lost count of the number of Technical Design Authority meetings I’ve sat in, watching smart people tie themselves in knots over a diagram. We’d debate whether a proposed change conformed to the “target architecture” – a utopian blueprint of a perfectly rationalised, fully integrated, and utterly fictional technology estate.

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Ben Holliday – Analogue innovation (doing one thing well):

The art of making a product that does one thing well has arguably been lost. With so many modern devices, digital overwhelm is everywhere. It’s design without trade-offs. The constraints used to be that products had to focus on a single function or task, or were limited by computing power or what was possible with engineering.

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Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens – Sourcing the stack for local government technology:

…there’s a systemic contradiction that local government is fragmented by design, but given the state of the market, councils often make similar technology choices, then individually procure many of the same products from a small pool of vendors, and separately expend the time of their under-resourced teams managing their own local technology stack of those similar products.

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Ben Thompson – The benefits of bubbles:

What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits.

(This reminds me again about how much I really want to be the Ben Thompson of local government IT. Just pay me to blog, someone! Please!)

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📅 Daily Note: November 7, 2025

Ash Mann – The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work:

Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus – choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting go of attractive ideas.

(via Neilly)

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Digital identity and the UK government’s announceability problem, by Richard Pope:

In the search for announcibility, tying it to the issue of immigration, and allowing the language of a singular ‘ID card’ to permeate, the government appeared to abandon the radical incrementalism and replace it with the sort of big bang tech announcement we all hoped were of the past. It also risked creating inertia for those teams in government who are already delivering. The inertia created by competing priorities, combined with a very particular, British, passive approach to calling out those contradictions, is toxic to delivery in the UK civil service.

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Lloyd nicely links to my newsletter but also points out the hideous URLs it produces for the web version. He’s right, but I am not sure what to do about it.

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I’ve always been leery of the Jetpack plugin – for some reason I can’t remember – but this article has made me consider reconsidering.

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Essex County Council has some excellent guidance around creating forms.

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📅 Daily Note: November 3, 2025

Set up a new council on localgov.blog today! Looking forward to seeing what they post.

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Some useful links in Ben’s halloweeknote.

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OpenQR.me – “Create beautiful QR codes instantly” (via Giles)

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Created a little online community around Localise Live! last week, using Basecamp. It isn’t very glamorous or exciting, but I’ve not found anything better for communities of practice-esque online spaces.

I worry sometimes about the ownership of the company and some of their problematic views – but at the moment it doesn’t feel like they infect the platform in the way it does at, say, Substack.

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📅 Daily Note: October 29, 2025

Find and reuse digital service elements is a website put together by some folk at the Ministry of Justice that signposts the user to examples of publicly available guidance and patterns for digital work.

Am not entirely sure what I think about it. Obviously it’s a lovely thing to have done, and the world is no worse for it existing, but I’m not sure just how reusable some of these artefacts are in the real world. Certainly the tagline – “Building public services together – one reusable block at a time” – feels a bit of a stretch.

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Rachel Coldicutt – There’s no such thing as a universal digital service:

In a world where Meta has more users than most countries have residents, it seems odd to say that digital services aren’t universal – but universal services need to work for everyone, not just for people who are digitally connected.

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Martin Wright – Mapping is thinking:

We often treat maps as deliverables – neat, tidy artefacts to show what we’re building. But the value of mapping isn’t in the artefact; the value of mapping is in getting there. The process of making the map is what helps us think, collaborate and move a problem forwards.

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Really good post this from Duncan Brown – Design by cliché:

But what “booking” means can vary wildly from service to service. Two thirds of breast screening appointments are administered via mobile vans. This is a different, and differently-complex, sense of “booking” from clinic-based appointments, and different in turn from “booking” a vaccination in a community pharmacy.

These “bookings” have little more in common than a name. And indeed that is exactly what teams at the Ministry of Justice found when they tried to standardise “bookings” for prisons.

I’ve done some thinking around this stuff and agree that saying things like “case management should be the same whether it’s adult social care or housing” is a bit daft. Likewise – bookings in my experience are often best developed using components at a layer of abstraction down – forms, payment, resource management, notifications, etc.

Words like booking, reporting, applying work well as service patterns, a layer of abstraction up from the technical gubbins. It’s still helpful to use them to help service designers and tech folk to speak a common language, but not so helpful for the techs putting together a platform of components.

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Transforming public services for a modern Wales [PDF warning]:

If Wales wants to rise to the challenge of improving public services, we have to change how we design and deliver them.

That means putting people first, adopting modern and open ways of working, drawing on the best digital practices to build services that are simple, efficient, and designed around real life-needs.

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Better tech won’t make joining the indieweb easier, but collectives could:

So how do we get more writers off centralised platforms and on to the indieweb? It’s not unsurprising that a tech audience thinks the answer lies in more, better or “easier” tech. But I think it requires a shift in perspective, away from an individualistic call for everyone to “skill up” and work out how to set up their own website. We need to think collectively, and pool resources. Those who can do all this need to help those who can’t.

Lloyd might be interested in this.

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More great sharing from Emily Webber – Building Communities of Practice that Amplify the Flow of Learning Across Organisations:

Humans learn the need to connect with others early on; we are born without the ability to look after ourselves, so we need that connection to survive, and that need doesn’t go away throughout our lives.

However, many of our organisations follow hierarchical, siloed organisational charts that discourage people from connecting across them, often split into separate cost centres, budgets and targets. Going against our human nature to connect.

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