An online notebook
Dave This from Dai Vaughan is really excellent on how technology failures keep damaging people’s lives, and how frustrating it is that the answers to this problem are well known, but unevenly implemented.
Mike Bracken’s take on Horizon.
Still noodling on what to do with the newsletter. Feels increasingly icky to keep using Substack but it is just so easy, and so free! Gah, ethics.
“One by one, England’s councils are going bankrupt – and nobody in Westminster wants to talk about it.”
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”
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.
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 🙂
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.”
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.