An online notebook
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An online notebook
Lovely story in the Guardian about the making of the 8-bit classic game Chukie Egg: The iconic game that came to define 8-bit programming still conjures flutters of nostalgia 40 years on – all thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy…
Useful reminder from dxw about the potential for things to go wrong on WordPress sites – in this case, a change of ownership for a suite of plugins. In August 2025 the new owner planted a backdoor in the purchased…
Like most people, I don’t often need to interact with my local council, and so – given the way I make a living – I tend to take notice when I do. Recently we got an email with an invoice…
The National Digital Exchange is a really neat idea that is looking more and more impressive. Basically, it’s a way to try out local government software – often open source – without needing to buy it first or run costly…
Will Callaghan is on a bit of a blogging roll at the moment. Here he is on Kickstarting collaboration during LGR: Of the speakers, the stand out two for me were Kate Hurr and Madeline Hoskin, of Cumberland and North…
I had the thought the other day that an awful lot of time gets wasted in local government digital because of the constant cycle of probably unnecessary change. Here’s an example: new chief digital person comes in, and the first…
Really good post from Kev Rowe on the Luton blog about how the team are preparing for the rollout of the new Netcall low code platform. Lots of learning of lessons from previous experience as well as tapping into the…
GDS Local have published the first iteration of their architecture for (digital) local government. It looks at this stage like very high level, simplified enterprise architecture. It will be interesting to see where it goes next. I worry about architecture…
Am super impressed with the way Doug is using AI tools to help him build useful software. Commonplace is a way of saving online stuff into collections. It’s a bit like Delicious of old. What’s more, browsing through the collections…
I sent out a newsletter for the first time in ages today. It’s a simple dump of the last week’s blog posts from here. Since I put in place the Jetopack-driven email subscription feature, precisely one person signed up, so…
Richard Pope: Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services: The principles of what makes a well-designed service remain the same as in the pre-AI digital era. AI should be treated as a design material rather than as a…
Not come across LOTI’s service innovation cards before, but they are lovely and would be really interested to learn about how it plays out in a workshop setting. It reminds me somewhat of the good old days of the social…
The Local Digital team at MHCLG is running a webinar to talk about the playbook we have been developing which guides digital teams through what they need to do during the creation of the new unitary councils. It’s on April…
Interesting perspective on Ai generated software from Quentin Stafford-Fraser: As we enter an era where software development is much cheaper and easier, the number of people able to create their own bespoke apps will increase rapidly. Either you’ll do it,…
Cloudflare have released a new open source CMS, that they are billing as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress. Unsurprisingly, Matt Mullenweg has views: The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend…
The team at Luton are experimenting in publishing project based week notes on their public blog.
Catherine Howe on her philosophical approach to working with AI models: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to help people get started with AI. Not the technical side — there are plenty of people better placed than me…
Following the announcements last week of the shape of local government arrangements in various areas, I’ve had to rethink things a bit. The move is clearly towards merging and empowering districts over centralising into unitary counties. This means an increase…
Alan Wright’s Definitions of Done Checklist.
Will Callaghan shares A new flatpack collaborative model for the public sector: The goal was to identify a ‘flatpack model’ which would make collaboration as easy as going it alone. There are currently 317 councils in England still building or…