Dave

Week note for 12 January 2024

A slow start to the year, blogging wise, been getting other stuff up straight. So here’s a bunch of things I’ve spotted during the last few days or so…

The delightful people at Lincoln Council are hiring a Web / Digital Officer. Lovely place to work on exciting local government things!

The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library. Ouch! If organisations still aren’t currently taking this stuff seriously, here’s another reason to start.

One dimensional pacman. Curiously addictive. (I see Neil also linked to this!)

I have had to replace my several years old Apple keyboard, and couldn’t justify to myself the nearly £100 cost of the official one, so picked up a Logitech version for a third of the price. It is taking a bit of getting used to and the resultant loss of productivity is alarming.

Let’s make the indie web easier – sensible post (and follow up) from Giles.

“How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu”

“How we’re making it easier to access government forms online”

“How can we get to a single shareable patient record?”

Daily note for 22 December 2023

Substack’s Nazi problem seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment. It’s a weird one for me, because I just don’t see it. It was a bit like that for me on Twitter as well, lots of people would say how toxic it was, but that just wasn’t my experience. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care though! Of course, after the Musk buyout it ended up being the case that my experience on X was very affected by the unpleasantness, which is why I now pretty much never look at it.

Substack has a great writing experience, and it’s free, and it makes it easy to send e-mails to people that are nicely designed and readable. That obviously comes at a cost and I wonder if the adage that if a service is free, then you are the product needs amending to something like, if a service is free there are probably some shitheads paying on your behalf and that makes you a bit of a shithead too.

I’ve no doubt I will have to move my newsletter away from Substack at some point. It’s a faff though and the alternatives aren’t obvious. Maybe I could use my new WordPress emailing setup to DIY it? Doesn’t fill me with joy, I have to say.

dxw’s review of 2023.

Daily note for 21 December 2023

Am playing around a bit with Feedland, Dave Winer’s newish RSS aggregating thing. I like how it is all public, so anyone can see the feeds I subscribe to and what is in them. Am enjoying the desktop app feel of NetNewsWire for now, so don’t think I will be switching, but it’s fun to play 🙂

“Principles, guidance, and standards to support people delivering joined-up, effective, user-centred outcomes for people who use Department for Education services.”

Laura Bunt is great and this interview gives an insight into how!

“What next for digital government and Government as a Platform?” Very interesting:

The next step for government as a platform is to directly help services transform. We’ll do this in two ways: first by going much further to help people make better design decisions for their services, and second, by helping services continually optimise themselves.

“The Transforming Government Services team in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) is redesigning the products and services offered to other government departments to support the delivery of their services. This includes updating existing standards and guidance, so that more services are implemented to a ‘great’ standard.”

On what we should call the folk who engage with local public services

Bit of an old chestnut, this, that I referred to in another post and I have been mulling on for a while.

User feels a bit techie, a bit too transactional, and sometimes like somebody who indulges in illicit substances. However it is delightfully generic.

Customers tend to have somewhere else to go, unlike many of those who engage with local public services. It does have it’s benefits though – it works for businesses and communities as well as individuals, and it is helpful to get colleagues to take improving the ‘customer’ experience seriously.

Citizens is a very complicated term in the UK, and besides, many of the people we work with are citizens of other places, not the UK.

Residents is one that I have liked for a while, but it doesn’t cover people who commute in, or visit for other reasons.

Businesses and community groups need to be factored in and the more individual terms don’t really cover this base. In work in the past, I have used the long and rather awkward ‘residents, communities, and businesses’. I now look on this period with a sense of shame.

On LinkedIn, Craig Hervey from Solihull asked why we don’t just use ‘the public’ – and he had a point. On mulling this though, I find the need for the definitive article a bit clumsy sometimes, and often plain old ‘public’ sounds just a bit weird.

On a current project working on digital strategy for a small local authority, I’ve needed to come up with a term to use, and this time I am trying to stick with ‘people’. Sometimes it can appear vague, which is a problem, but I then do a bit of work on the rest of the sentence to try and provide any additional context that is needed.

So that’s that, for now, for me. Those who engage with local public services are people.

Daily note for 18 December 2023

I’m barely posting any links into Raindrop. I just like linking to them here, on my blog. But I worry they get lost. Not that I ever seem to look for them.

I newslettered.

Some nice bits in Matt Mullenweg’s bag.

Public Digital’s data strategy playbook. Plenty of good stuff to learn from in here.

A literal twist on the classic Minesweeper game.

How product teams are using prototyping in the public sector:

A few teams were very mature in their prototyping practices. When they needed to move fast, try out loads of ideas and surface issues quickly, they used low-fidelity prototypes in paper, Powerpoint, and Mural or Miro. These helped them test out different journeys and flows. They progressed to Figma and Prototype Kit when they needed more fidelity or to test out technical approaches.

More good stuff from Steve: all of this post is worth reading, but the section on Cycles, not sprints is great:

For research and development work (like discovery and alpha), you need a little bit longer to get your head into a domain and have time to play around making scrappy prototypes. For build work, a two-week sprint isn’t really two weeks. With all the ceremonies required for co-ordination and sharing information – which is a lot more labour-intensive in remote-first settings – you lose a couple of days with two-week sprints.

Sprint goals suck too. It’s far too easy to push it along and limp from fortnight to fortnight, never really considering whether you should stop the workstream. It’s better to think about your appetite for doing something, and then to focus on getting valuable iterations out there rather than committing to a whole thing.

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