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Holibobs
Am back from a wonderful week with the family in Suffolk. Some lovely days by the sea in Southwold and Aldeburgh, and a trip to the castle in Framlingham too.
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
📅 Daily Note: August 7, 2025
AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI. # – micropost 22995 Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”. # – micropost 22996 Ben Unsworth is…
📅 Daily Note: July 25, 2025
I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster: Every few months I set aside time for a “random…
On user groups for local government software
Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it? It seems like vendors are keen to say…
📅 Daily Note: July 15, 2025
Ben Welby: Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street # – micropost 22969 Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as…
📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025
Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service. # – micropost 22965 Ben Holliday: New ways of organising: What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard…
On ‘the single view of the customer’
“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway. ‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue…
📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025
Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”. In the digital age the answer…
Content Restrictor WordPress plugin
For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis. There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability…
📄 Balancing ambition and caution in LGR
Chatting with Clare this morning about all things digital and local government reorganisation, I came to the conclusion that it really is all a balancing act. The risks of things going wrong are huge, and the importance of being ‘safe…
📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025
Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working. # – micropost 22920 Some interesting notes on the issues around the software market for local government. # – micropost 22934 My general take…
💻 New Mac, new setup (June 2025)
I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I…
📅 Daily Note: June 3, 2025
Nice, insightful set of principles around how Martin Wright writes his weeknotes: I write about what’s stuck with me when I sit down to write my weeknote. I don’t want to assume what’s important, or interesting enough to weeknote while…
📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025
Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good. In…
😮💨 Coming up for air
It’s been nearly 6 months since I last posted here, and I have been really quiet on the likes of LinkedIn and Bluesky too. If I am honest doesn’t feel like months, this year has just raced past. What’s been…
🖥️ Join the Change Makers – every month, online!
My good friend Carl Haggerty and I are really pleased to be kicking off a new monthly thing – The Change Makers. The first one is on Tuesday, 28th January 2025 at 11am and you can sign up for it…
📅 Daily Note: December 18, 2024
Ed Zitron: The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an…
📅 Daily Note: December 13, 2024
Dave Rogers answers the question Just what is ‘Test and Learn’? # – micropost 22849 Lloyd writes up his experience of new, location based social network thing Mozi. Just like it’s 2008 all over again! # – micropost 22865 Anything that…
📅 Daily Note: December 12, 2024
It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly. # – micropost 22785…
📅 Daily Note: December 11, 2024
Digitisation, politicisation and the civil service by Martha Lane Fox: Today’s reality is clear: digital skills are no longer optional extras. Data analysis, digital service design, agile project management, let alone the nuance needed in understanding new AI tools, have…