An online notebook
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An online notebook
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…
A new Mac desktop RSS aggregator for me to have a look at.
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.
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about the new telephony system implementation: When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how…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…
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…