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Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure: A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to…
The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns. It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in…
There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.
Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running: AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your…
Multiplayer snake in a terminal window, you say? Why not.
Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms: Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that…
Ben Carpenter shares some recent updates to the service standard (LinkedIn warning): We’ve made it extra clear in ‘Solve a whole problem for users’ and ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ that existing principles to design around users and not…
Interesting writing project from Ben Welby – The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World: Public service teams are at a kairos moment: a time when a new technical capability invites us to rethink almost everything…
I’ve added auto-posting from this blog onto LinkedIn and Bluesky, using IFTTT to automate taking the RSS feed and turning it into posts on those networks. I ran into an issue with the full posts being too long for Bluesky,…
Digital LGR Playbook launched!
One of the projects I have been working on for the last 6 months or so is the playbook of support for councils going through reorganisation, which specifically looks at the digital and digital-adjacent things that need dealing with. It’s…
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…
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…