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Publishing stuff
One of the things I love about the internet most is the fact that it puts the power to publish into the hands of pretty much anybody. There are many ways of doing it these days, whether by using a…
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Five for Friday (26/5/17)
Five more nourishing morsels I’ve spotted this week: LocalGovCamp is back this September in Bristol. Find out more and sign up for the ticket lottery here. The Disappearing Computer – Walt Mossberg’s last column is a great read on the future…
Five for Friday (19/5/17)
Five more nuggets of interest I’ve spotted this week: Jessica Lessin built a business to prove information doesn’t have to be free – great podcast about the different models emerging for journalism online. The Information is a great site, by the…
Five for Friday
Am going to try and get a quick link roundup post out every Friday if I can, pointing out some interesting stuff I’ve seen during the week. Management is not about asking people to do stuff – really interesting article…
Six principles for good local government technology
As part of the work putting together a Technology Strategy (think IT + digital) for my current employer, I came up with six principles of good technology. The idea is that each of these principles must be met by any…
Maybe tomorrow I think I’ll settle down
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? It’s hard when thinking about the things we do to scratch out a living not to recall Larkin’s words about the manner in which work can dominate our lives.…
What I use 2016 edition
Here’s an update on the kit and software I’m using on a daily basis, just in case it’s of use. My main computer is an 11” Macbook Air. It has the i7 processor and 8gb of RAM and is the…
My newsletter is back
A quick note to say that this weekend I wrote up a newsletter for the first time since late 2014. I scheduled it to be published earlier today. If you’d like to see what was in it, you can read…
Anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations
Michael Coté has written an excellent post describing seven anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations. Number six is a particularly egregious crime, in my view: Pay people to ignore them — BigCo’s love hiring new employees, paying them well, and then rarely listening…
Worthing Library hack
Very briefly, West Sussex County Council and FutureGov are hacking the library in Worthing next month. I’ve written a bit about it on the Adur and Worthing Councils digital blog, in case you’re interested.
How much does your technology define what you do?
A fairly quick thought this, but one than keeps occurring to me. It feels like a self evident truth that the technology an organisation uses should follow that organisation’s purpose, and not the other way around, but I wonder how…
Interesting publications on design, technology and change for ‘good’
I’m pulling together a list of interesting, thought-provoking reading on how design, technology and change (the three things that, for me, define ‘digital’) can help organisations that work in the community, voluntary, charity, non-profit, social enterprise type space. Is there…
Our strategy for digital transformation
I recently gave a brief talk on our digital strategy at Adur and Worthing. Here are the (rather dull) slides, in case they are useful. Important to note that only one of the five key themes are anything to do with…
Rehosting podcasts
Last year I recorded a bunch of podcasts that people seemed to enjoy. They were hosted on a service that needed paying for, and when I stopped paying, they dropped off the internet! Oh no! So, have rehosted them on…
Eleven years a blogger
According to the archive on this site, I’ve been writing this blog for eleven years today – since September 2004. This is the 2,646th post and there have been 4,263 comments on them over the years. Lots has changed in…
What I’m talking about when I’m talking about government as a platform
So, a little while ago I posted about government as a platform, and mentioned three main components that matter, particularly to us at Adur and Worthing with our approach. However, I’ve been involved in various conversations where I’ve been confused…
Post-post-bureaucrat
I’ve always rather liked the title of Steph’s blog and how he gives us occasional updates on how his life outside of the government machine is going. His post-bureaucrat life seems to be going really well. I left government as…
The elements of council as a platform
We are fairly aggressively targeting a platform approach to service design and delivery at Adur and Worthing. Summing this up is the vision statement in our (still developing) strategy is: “To use our expertise and platforms to help the people,…
Rethinking performance management
There’s so much I want to blog about at the moment, but pretty much no time to do it. However, here’s a nice little thing we’re working on that might be of interest. Performance management is one of those things…
The war against crap software
The end of my second week at Adur and Worthing and it has been relentless. I’m loving it, but feeling the need to come up for air – you may perhaps have noticed I’ve been quiet on this blog and…