Dave

Dave

Some major reworking of this blog over the last few days. Dramatically simplified things – sadly the micropost format that Steph helped me build didn’t make the cut. Instead I am making use of the default WordPress ‘asides’ post format…

Roger Swannell – Getting agile governance right: In a traditional waterfall or stage-gated development process quality assurance and approval checks happen towards the end of the work. It makes sense if you’re optimising for efficiency as all the quality check…

Wise words as always from Catherine Howe – Change is a layered thing: There is an alchemy to taking stuff you have already and turning it into something different but I think that’s the essence of organisational change. You are…

Terrific list of recommended posts from Steve Messer.

I hadn’t noticed that Canva had bought Affinity and made it free. How long it will stay that way, who knows, but seems a good deal to grab for the meantime.

Nina Belk, dxw – Improving the transition from policy to delivery with service patterns: ‘Service patterns’ are reusable building blocks that help teams to design services end-to-end and front-to-back, in a coherent and consistent way, making them easier to deliver…

AI is not a strategy

AI is not a strategy, it’s a tactic. Once all the fuss has settled down, we will be in a position where specific AI tools are useful in specific circumstances – it won’t have “transformed” anything. We had exactly this…

Dennis Vergne – The Hidden History of Relational Public Services: From the Coal Mine to the Front Door: It is not a single invention, but a recurring discovery made by different people in different decades (miners, social workers, nurses, economists,…

Catherine Howe – We need new feedback loops: If we want to think differently together then we need to create new feedback loops and the chance to gain confidence in new approaches. Many of the professional networks that we have…

📅 Daily Note: December 2, 2025

Gavin Beckett – Harnessing the changing landscape of local government to create internet era organisations: Effective responses to complex, long-standing social challenges need to be co-designed and co-produced with people and community organisations that grow from the ground up. Modern…

📅 Daily Note: November 25, 2025

Richard Pope – Preventative healthcare: designing for the service loop: # – micropost 23148 Katherine Wastell – Every organisation has some madness: If everyone spots the problems but no one takes responsibility, things will only get worse. Accountability is the…

📅 Daily Note: November 10, 2025

Dafydd Singleton – User needs for data standards. # – micropost 23142 Dafydd Vaughan – The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture’ won’t ever deliver: I’ve lost count of the number of Technical Design Authority meetings I’ve sat in,…

📅 Daily Note: November 7, 2025

Ash Mann – The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work: Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus – choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting…

📅 Daily Note: November 3, 2025

Set up a new council on localgov.blog today! Looking forward to seeing what they post. # – micropost 23129 Some useful links in Ben’s halloweeknote. # – micropost 23130 OpenQR.me – “Create beautiful QR codes instantly” (via Giles) # –…

📅 Daily Note: October 29, 2025

Find and reuse digital service elements is a website put together by some folk at the Ministry of Justice that signposts the user to examples of publicly available guidance and patterns for digital work. Am not entirely sure what I…

📅 Daily Note: October 21, 2025

Sarah and Carl are taking up the reigns of LocalGovDigital – a Slack-based networks of digital practitioners in local government, and I’m stepping down. I think they’ll do a great job and am really excited about what they will be…

📅 Daily Note: October 16, 2025

I enjoyed Scott Colfer’s reflections on writing and publishing his book. # – micropost 23105 Lloyd reports not getting a pingback from me when I linked to his blog. Am not surprised the micropost didn’t ping, but the daily note…

📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025

I newslettered earlier. # – micropost 23087 i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging. I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily…

📅 Daily Note: October 6, 2025

A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw: Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and…