Get posts sent to your inbox:
New post from Atika on the Luton blog – Full steam ahead! New posts filled, skills assessments, meeting room envy, change agents and champions and AI Club. What a start to 2026!
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Can’t stop listening to Sigur Rós’ Starálfur – such an ethereally beautiful song.
Tom Loosemore (LinkedIn warning) on how he vibe coded a useful app in no time at all: It really was – and is – that easy. That said, under the bonnet Replit has written a horridly inaccessible, unsupportable, unextendable hairball…
Dave Richardson at Newark and Sherwood District Council – Nine Councils. One Message. A playbook for Multi‑Council Digital Collaboration: When all nine councils across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were tasked with communicating the complexities of local government reorganisation (LGR), it was…
Mike Gallagher – In public : Notes on working in the open: The phrase “make things open: it makes things better” gets tossed around a lot and sounds simple, but I think it encapsulates a profound set of ideas that…
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 30 January 2026
January has felt like a looooong month, and I haven’t really enjoyed it. Doesn’t feel like I am remotely up to speed after the festive break, still! So tired. So very tired. This week’s worky highlights: Getting some of the…
Mahad Kalam – The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site: The UK Government recently unveiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC…
Am finding the WP Reset plugin useful, particularly at the start of a project where I might be trying lots of different stuff out. Quickly takes a site back to the bare bones, clearing out the database and so on,…
Carl Haggerty – Introducing the Chrysalis Work: Working in a council right now can feel a lot like being inside a chrysalis. The old shape of things is still visible – job titles, structures, budgets, habits – but much of…
John Gruber reports on the new version of OmniOutliner (6) which includes a featured called Omni Links: OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the…
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 23 January 2026
Blogging has been a little light this week. Just not that much stuff to link to, and I’ve been in a headspace where I’ve not had too many share-worthy thoughts or ideas. I’ve been tired – maybe that’s the reason.…
Laura Czapiewski – Why human trust shapes AI success: The psychology of digital has never been more important than now, in the age of AI. There are countless examples of where AI has proved to be far more reliable than…
Lovely post from Luton’s Ben McCartney on the improvements he and his team have been making to the service desk at the council.
Government customer services to be modernised with help of industry experts: The government is launching CustomerFirst, a new unit within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, to modernise public services and improve the experience for millions of people who…
A roadmap for modern digital government: Our plan to build a modern digital government that works for you – making life easier, driving growth and delivering smarter, more efficient public services
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 16 January 2026
Let’s see how long I can keep this up for! This week’s worky highlights: We are recruting for two big roles at Luton Head of Innovation Delivery and Data Deputy Data Protection Officer & Compliance Improvement Manager Also at Luton,…
Fixed an issue in my Tidycal appointment booking thingy, where Teams meetings were being booked but no meeting link provided. It was a simple case of disconnecting the accounts and then reconnecting them (yup, turn it off and on again,…
Wow – Microsoft Copilot blamed by Chief Constable for Maccabi Tel Aviv ban: The incident and subsequent review have reignited debates about police decision-making, community engagement, and the balance between public safety and fairness in policing high-profile events. It has…
Now I’m wondering whether I should just put everything pre-2026 into an ‘Archive’ category and just start afresh from this year… A though just occurred – part of the reason why the categories are in a mess is probably because…
Recategorising over 3,000 blog posts
I have been frustrated with the state of the categories on this blog for some years now. That’s right – years. This site has been going in one form or another for over 20 years – the first post being…