Dave

Dave

  • Joined: January 6, 2026
  • Articles: 3190
  • Comments: 518

My battle with GoDaddy customer support continues over my borked locali.se domain. In the meantime, dave@sensibletech.co.uk will still reach me 😩

Matt Hill-Wood – Co-designing digital planning products at scale: Certain principles were clear: Councils, particularly the people closest to the ‘frontline’ of planning services, need to be as close to product decisions as possible Decisions must be informed by voices…

This looks like an important read – the first from from the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government: Our inquiry identified four building blocks for successful digital transformation, and four barriers…

Jason Snell on the proliferation of vibe-coded Mac apps, and his experience of making one himself: The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only…

Good, thoughtful stuff from Steve Messer in his latest week note: My main hypothesis is that the existing set of products, platforms and enabling services was not built for a joined-up, personalised paradigm. Service teams are attempting to better meet…

A digital standard for local government

The service standard has had a difficult time getting traction in local government, as a report from the LGA made clear – and this despite councils theoretically committing to it when they signed the digital declaration. But when Atika asked…

Steph Gray on how he leant into using AI tools on a recent web build: It’s been the first project on which I’ve used significant amounts of AI support with the build. For me, for this kind of work, using…

Shelley Heckman shares an update on the Open Referral standard, and particularly the validator tool, on LinkedIn: The Validator plays an important role across the wider ecosystem. It enables feed owners to check their own data, gives suppliers a way…

Am trialling Aeronaut – a nice, native desktop app for Bluesky on MacOS. So far, so good.

Doug Belshaw is doing something interesting with Substrate – a sort of public everything bucket as blog thing.

Huh, this “using GenAI checklist” is pretty brutal, but thought-provoking: By using GenAI: ☐ I accept the models were trained on stolen data. ☐ I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers. ☐ I accept the environmental costs…

Have added a ‘Hire me’ page to the blog, to remind people (and occasionally myself) what I do for a living! It’s at

Phil Rumens writes a thoughtful piece on the use of open source software in local government: When open-source is discussed in the public sector, it is usually framed around transparency and reuse. The code behind products and tools built with…

James Plunkett – Could the NHS leapfrog the rest on public sector digital work?: I want to argue, however, for a more ambitious framing: that over the next five years, the NHS could leapfrog others in the public sector, and…

Made an update to DIgitalGovNews – adding a filter to the top so users can decide which feeds should appear on the page. Check it out: Mostly added because my blog dominates it somewhat and people might want to…

Today, I made DigitalGovNews – an aggregated stream of updates from sites mostly publishing about digital in government. You can find it at It’s very simple – just a single page of PHP and a stylesheet. It sucks in…

Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald, quoted in The Verge: We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount,” said Macdonald. “So if you’re not actually able to draw a direct…

I like the look of the Daylight DC–1 – it’s like a Remarkable e-ink tablet that also has a web browser on it. Using it with a keyboard for a distraction free writing tool looks neat too. Bloody expensive though…

Giles Turnbull – Working in the open ≠ comms: Comms seeks to bring about positive opinions of the work. Those opinions might be confined to a small group of relevant stakeholders, or they might be splashed across the pages of…

Am having some problems with the registration of my locali.se domain – which means the website isn’t working (no big deal really) but more annoyingly, emails to my @locali.se email address aren’t coming through. If you want to email me,…