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Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
Claire Craig from the Essex Digital Service on User research in libraries: finding the voices between the bookshelves We’re currently working through a research project, exploring Essex residents’ thoughts and feelings about AI being used in public services. We’ve recruited…
New book from Public Digital, might well be worth an order: Shaping technology for transformation.
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 13 February 2026
Another Tuesday posting! Weeks are flying by. I guess this is part of getting older. That and getting increasingly bad at remembering, well, anything. This week’s worky highlights: The publication of the LGR DDaT playbook has been postponed for a…
Carol from the team at Luton blogs about the new telephony system implementation: When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how…
The LGA have released their toolkit for local government reorganisation (LGR). There’s not much digital in it – largely because that will be covered in detail in MHCLG’s DDaT LGR playbook, which I have been working on with the team…
More blog tweaking. I’ve added an email subscription option so readers can get news posts from here in their inboxes automagically. Just use the sign up box in the header of the site on desktop, or on mobile the same…
Catherine Howe – Head towards the North Star: Some of the shifts we need to make are very much rooted in public service; better coproduction with communities, prevention at scale and deep modernisation of technology and practice. Some of this…
Government IT project disasters are by no means a thing of the past: The PAC’s latest report reveals that NS&I has spent an estimated £111 million on the programme by March 2024, yet it remains unclear how much has been…
A small piece of blog housekeeping: I just went to search for something I wrote years ago on here and realised in my last redesign I didn’t add an easy to find search function. So, I bunged the default theme…
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 6 February 2026
A Tuesday posting but I don’t suppose anybody minds – most of this was written last week though, promise. This week’s worky highlights: The LGR DDaT playbook is on the cusp of release, which is very exciting. It’ll be nice…
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!
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…