An online notebook
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An online notebook
Matt Cain – The Architecture of Effective Digital Government Centres: Over the last eighteen months a distinct cohort of governments has produced fast measurable gains in digital government. These aren’t “just” against international rankings (the biennial UN Index will be…
Ronan Fitzgerald on the Justice Digital, Data and Science blog writes How user research transformed GOV.UK guidance for separating families: Thousands of people use guidance on child arrangements every month, often at some of the most stressful moments in their…
TPX Impact have published a “Market-shaping playbook for policymakers”: Market-shaping is the practice of designing and delivering interventions that make a public service market produce better outcomes. Services like planning, housing management, social care and education are powered by markets,…
Via Jukesie – the Department for Education’s Product management principles.
Kailani Knight – The Certainty Principles: Accessibility work often feels chaotic. Every new project seems to start from scratch. Every person who flags a barrier is treated like a unique puzzle to solve. The result is slow, expensive, exhausting –…
On the MHCLG Digital blog – Building Local Transcribe for local government: Local Transcribe is a new AI-powered tool designed to change that by capturing conversations, transcribing and summarising them, and producing a draft set of case notes for officers…
Ben Welby helpfully summarises a lot of the chatter about where all the digital stuff in government is going following the decision to break up DSIT.
Johnny Williams – No Ivory Towers Here Please (LinkedIn warning): What DSIT hasn’t done is build sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure below that GOV.UK front door. Standardising the citizen-facing layer is a different achievement from owning the plumbing underneath it,…
MySociety asks Robots and councils: how is AI being used by local government – and what can we find out about it? Artificial Intelligence, as we know, is everywhere. For governments and public bodies, the possibilities for policy-making seem endless.…
James Plunkett publishes a long read on approaches to education (Medium warning). It’s well worth your time. Really like this in the concluding paragraphs: The challenges facing public services can feel demoralising; there is such a mismatch between the complexity…
Richard Pope: On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate (LinkedIn warning): The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically,…
Matt Wood-Hill continues to blog his thoughts on his time in government working on digital planning. This is a useful reflection on how central government best works with local: ODP starts from the premise that those working at the coalface…
More new content on the LGR digital playbook! This time, it’s quite a long read on commercial, contract and supplier considerations during reorganisation. This quote from a local gov person interviewed for the piece is perceptive and as a sector…
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…
A few people have asked if the work on the existing Service Standard affects the Local Government Digital Standard. Yes and no! First up, read the post. It’s good and it looks like the Service Standard is going into some…