An online notebook
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An online notebook
Steph Tucker – An observation: many government content style guides exist, but they’re rarely used in practice (LinkedIn warning): A much better approach is to make content patterns and standards an active team practice. You can do this by running…
Another great hire at Luton – welcome to James Bovington, joining as principal developer in the newly formed digital team. James is one of the most ingenious and thoughtful devs I’ve come across, so it’s fabulous having him on the…
Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, has released a new RSS reader, Inkwell. It has some interesting features: Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts…
Adrian Imms at the University of Sussex with a whole host of helpful thoughts following their experience significantly reducing the number of editors of the corporate website: In early February, we finally managed to centralise the editing of our public…
I have had the pleasure over the last couple of years of being a member of Woking Council’s Digital Design Authority. This is a group made up of a few senior members of the digital team at the Council, the…
Will Callaghan – who knows more about this stuff than most – shares his thoughts on how to be a better collaborator, based on his experience with the LocalGovDrupal project.
Lovely to see the new people joining the team in Luton, and introducing themselves on the blog. Welcome to my old pal Kev Rowe 😀
Simon Millier from Adur & Worthing Councils reports on progress with open digital planning (Medium warning): It’s been a busy and productive period for our multi-disciplinary team. As usual we’re balancing the Open Digital Planning project alongside day-to-day business as…
As an experiment, relating to some work I’m doing for a customer, I asked Google’s Gemini to do some deep research and write a report about the market for revenues and benefits systems for UK local government. You can read…
This is neat: Gazette is a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers.
Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure: A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to…
The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns. It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in…
There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.
Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running: AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your…
Multiplayer snake in a terminal window, you say? Why not.
Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms: Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that…
Ben Carpenter shares some recent updates to the service standard (LinkedIn warning): We’ve made it extra clear in ‘Solve a whole problem for users’ and ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ that existing principles to design around users and not…
Interesting writing project from Ben Welby – The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World: Public service teams are at a kairos moment: a time when a new technical capability invites us to rethink almost everything…
I’ve added auto-posting from this blog onto LinkedIn and Bluesky, using IFTTT to automate taking the RSS feed and turning it into posts on those networks. I ran into an issue with the full posts being too long for Bluesky,…
One of the projects I have been working on for the last 6 months or so is the playbook of support for councils going through reorganisation, which specifically looks at the digital and digital-adjacent things that need dealing with. It’s…