Dave

Daily note for 12 September 2023

“It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy” – somewhat concerning.

Love this, eccentric bringing back to life of ancient, almost useless technology. Beautiful.

Lovely reflections from Tim Davies, someone I don’t speak to much these days but remember very fondly from the wild west early days of social media and whatnot.

Lloyd on networks, connections and location – and why we need Dopplr back.

Lambeth are in the seat for this Local Digital Fund project on building control. Worth keeping an eye on. (Again, though, why oh why Medium?)

James Herbert reflects on recent engagements around data, and what lessons can be drawn. Definitely worthy of a mull.

As Rob on Twitter says, these five points from TechUK about ‘care tech’ feel a bit sticking-plaster-y.

Daily note for 7 September 2023

Chunky update as I haven’t published for a couple of days. Was in the office in Lambeth yesterday.

Whoever designed the file sharing permissions in Microsoft 365 should probably go and find some other purpose in life.

Postmarks looks interesting. Like a single-user but federated del.icio.us style bookmarking site.

Steph and I migrated LocalGov.blog away from the shared hosting it was on to something a bit more robust and scalable (Digital Ocean, via SpinupWP). It was a bit fraught at times as WordPress multisite can be a cranky beast, and there were the usual frustrations waiting for DNS changes to propagate and so on. But we got there!

Remember, if you need a site hosting for something, and it’s vaguely local government related, you can ask for it to be set up on LocalGov.blog. Just drop me a line!

Runnymede – from Magna Carta to simplified public services – interesting stuff, feels like a vendor driven piece – maybe? – but subtle about it.

Improving the SEND local offer – always impressive to see Stockport blogging away about the work they are doing. I don’t think I know anyone there, need to fix that.

I newslettered yesterday – “Continuing a recent theme here, I was at the weekend mulling over the – perfectly correct – narrative that ‘technology isn’t the most important thing’. To my mind, this has unfortunately been interpreted by many as ‘technology doesn’t matter at all’, which has left many organisations in a bit of a pickle.”

What do you mean you don’t want to use Audacity in the browser?

Couple of great videos from Russell Davies on presenting:

Daily note for 31 August 2023

I sent out a newsletter this morning.

These daily notes are going well, I think, in that I am keeping up with them and it’s really helpful to keep a record of the good stuff I am coming across. But am definitely just posting links, and not really saying much else. I’ll try and fix that – unless, of course, people like the links, and don’t like my wittering.

Design for audiences or topics and tasks? – good stuff from the team in Bristol and always good to see the blogs I host being active!

Daily note for 30 August 2023

I wrote a post about simple things for leadership types to bear in mind when thinking about technology.

WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).

What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”

5 simple rules for organisational leaders to keep in mind about technology

Commenting on James Herbert’s sensible post about approaching AI in local government, I came up with 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious that all senior people ought to have in their minds whenever technology is being discussed.

  • If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one
  • You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations
  • There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan
  • There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic
  • Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

Increasingly, I tend to speak about digital being different from previous approaches to technology because it includes a healthy dose of cynicism about the ability of technology to improve anything, ever. Perhaps these points reflect that!

Load more posts!