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This is so good – Richard Pope has shared the detail as well as the slides for a talk on how his Platformland ideas should be applied to the NHS’ 10-year Plan. Loads to apply across the whole spectrum of…
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Harry Metcalfe shares a cautionary tale of vibe coding and security: But the arrival of these tools has – like all development tools that help get more done more easily – raised the security stakes. Tools like Lovable make building…
The legendary email client power users wouldn’t let die: Eudora was, from the very beginning, quirky software built for power users. Like a film director who respects their audience, skipping over exposition and letting them fill in the blanks. It’s…
Mist is an ephemeral, collaborative markdown editor in the browser. Handy!
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 20 February 2026
Short week last week as I took a couple of days off for half term. Also, I need to get into the habit of writing these during the week they actually refer to. This week’s worky highlights: Some more Skillstats…
Doug Belshaw – I needed a scheduling tool that respects privacy. So I built one: Scheduler reads iCal feeds, so it works with Proton Calendar or any service supporting iCal/CalDAV standards. It doesn’t store calendar data, instead checking availability in…
Emily Webber – A New Communities of Practice Model for Organisational Maturity: This new model focuses on organisational maturity at five levels from low awareness to self-sustaining and setting standards across six dimensions (structure, culture, collaboration, support, technology and impact).…
Tom Loosemore published some thoughts about public services and AI on LinkedIn: Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible. This is both unfair and…
Missed this first time around, but there’s some interesting stuff to think about in here – Courage is required for GDS Local to succeed. There is currently both a real opportunity and a grave danger facing local government in England…
A new Mac desktop RSS aggregator for me to have a look at.
Claire Craig from the Essex Digital Service on User research in libraries: finding the voices between the bookshelves We’re currently working through a research project, exploring Essex residents’ thoughts and feelings about AI being used in public services. We’ve recruited…
New book from Public Digital, might well be worth an order: Shaping technology for transformation.
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 13 February 2026
Another Tuesday posting! Weeks are flying by. I guess this is part of getting older. That and getting increasingly bad at remembering, well, anything. This week’s worky highlights: The publication of the LGR DDaT playbook has been postponed for a…
Carol from the team at Luton blogs about the new telephony system implementation: When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how…
The LGA have released their toolkit for local government reorganisation (LGR). There’s not much digital in it – largely because that will be covered in detail in MHCLG’s DDaT LGR playbook, which I have been working on with the team…
More blog tweaking. I’ve added an email subscription option so readers can get news posts from here in their inboxes automagically. Just use the sign up box in the header of the site on desktop, or on mobile the same…
Catherine Howe – Head towards the North Star: Some of the shifts we need to make are very much rooted in public service; better coproduction with communities, prevention at scale and deep modernisation of technology and practice. Some of this…
Government IT project disasters are by no means a thing of the past: The PAC’s latest report reveals that NS&I has spent an estimated £111 million on the programme by March 2024, yet it remains unclear how much has been…
A small piece of blog housekeeping: I just went to search for something I wrote years ago on here and realised in my last redesign I didn’t add an easy to find search function. So, I bunged the default theme…
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 6 February 2026
A Tuesday posting but I don’t suppose anybody minds – most of this was written last week though, promise. This week’s worky highlights: The LGR DDaT playbook is on the cusp of release, which is very exciting. It’ll be nice…