Dave

Housekeeping

Photo by Fikret tozak on Unsplash

I’ve been making a few changes around here!

This blog has existed in one form or another for a very long time – since September 2004 in fact. It’s a bit of a hotch-potch of content, because as well as the posts I have been making regularly on here in the form of a personal blog, I also have imported into it the archives of various others sites I have maintained in the past, whether for work or other projects.

Over this time it has had many guises, names and URLs, but has been settled at da.vebrig.gs and on WordPress.com for a fair few years.

However, I have this week migrated the whole archive of my blog to a self hosted WordPress instance. This is because I want to merge the content from the SensibleTech website into this one, and some of the content requires some customisation that isn’t possible on WP.com without shelling out more cash than I would like to.

It shouldn’t look too different at the moment, as I have stuck with the same theme and only tweaked the odd display setting.

So far I have imported the standard posts and the table containing the list of local government blogs. All this content is stored in the category ‘sensibletech‘ so if needed, it can be found in one place.

The next job is to import the link library, which is made up of a customer post type, custom taxonomies and some custom theme code to make it work. That will probably be a long job, so don’t hold your breath!

DDAT or D:DDAT?

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

Just a quick post on a rather semantical topic!

The phrase DDAT – standing for digital, design and technology – has become a commonly adopted bit of industry jargon in government circles, to describe the work that people do in this thing we call digital.

However, I find it just doesn’t quite work for me, and I think it is because of the use of the word digital within it. I think in the definition, digital is meant to cover things like user centredness, service design, digital culture and so on – but this isn’t terribly clear.

So, I have found myself on occasion instead referring to digital: design, data and technology. I’ve never abbreviated it, but I suppose that if I did it would be D:DDAT.

For me, D:DDAT gets across the idea that ‘digital’ encompasses the use of design, data and technology rather than being separate from the latter two.

This hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, but I thought it worth sharing! 🤷‍♂️

Interesting links 25 March 2022

Things I’ve seen that are worth sharing.

Exciting next steps for Local Digital and Cyber – Local Digital Collaboration Unit

The Local Digital and Cyber teams are going to be making some exciting changes over the next few months, backed by multi-year funding to the tune of £85 million.

We’re developing an enhanced approach that will allow us to support the local government sector to achieve even more brilliant things, as well as fix the core problems.

Stockport Council announces ambitious Radical Digital Strategy – Holly Rae, Craig Hughes & Adrian Davies

Today we have announced our ambitious new Digital Strategy. It aims to provide residents, businesses and partners with an overview of our digital ambitions for the borough, based on three broad pillars: Digital Communities, Digital Place and Digital Council.

Community of Practice Kick-off Canvas (with Miro template) – Emily Webber

The Tacit community of practice kick-off canvas helps get your community started or reset using a canvas framework that guides you through six questions… It has been available for a couple of years on my company website as a printable pdf, and I have recently turned it into a Miro board template, which anyone can use.

Interesting links 18 March 2022

Things I’ve seen that are worth sharing.

The Policymaking / DDAT Divide – Jerry Fishenden

Despite politicians’ grand ambitions for DDaT since at least 1996, it’s had relatively little impact on radical government renewal and reform. Yet the political ambition has remained fairly constant during these 26 years: to ensure users are the focus, not providers; to design services more closely around people’s needs and lives; and to deliver more effective, and higher quality public services.

Think Links icebreakers a Miro board template that you can use – Emily Webber

These two quick lateral thinking icebreaker games will help participants flex their creative thinking muscles before jumping into your workshops. I love that they help get people checked into the session and open up new ways of thinking, particularly good if you want creativity in your workshop.

How we’re building our data platform as a product – Osian Llwyd Jones

While companies large and small have made considerable gains in building a scalable and sustainable architecture, we’re left with the uncomfortable questions: is what we’re doing truly providing value? Do we really know who our users are and understand their needs? If so, can they generate insights in a fast and reliable way? As long as users don’t complain and pipelines don’t fail, does that mean all is well? For all our investment in data, are we seeing the return?

The Birmingham Digital Approach – Peter `Bishop

As we enter this new phase, I am keen that we now move away from being seen as just an IT provider to the rest of the council to one where we can start to work more collaboratively in partnership with our service leads so that we prioritise, manage our demand, design and shape and build great digital services together; a place where we cultivate and nurture an environment of working in the open; grow our digital talent and become centres of excellence of good practice across our various digital and technology disciplines.

Sharing our new user research templates and guides – Helen Calderon

Today we’re sharing the first of our new user research templates and guides. We designed these for teams working within the council, and they can easily be adapted for teams working in other councils. You’ll find these on GitHub. Download them, make them your own, and let us know if we can make them even better.

Open source revenues and benefits

Am really chuffed to be a part of this project, funded by the team at DLUHC, to see how portable the in-house developed revenues and benefits system from Sedgemoor council is. We will also be looking at the licensing and governance model for making the system potentially open source – potentially a revolutionary move.

What’s also nice is that the project needed a home for its blog, and in an, er, semi-professional capacity, I was able to knock something up on LocalGov Blogs, along with the free version of the Blocksy theme.

As always when I run into WordPress issues, Steph Gray is on hand to help me. Thanks buddy!

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