An online notebook
Get posts by weekly email:
An online notebook
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…
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…
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, 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…
The view over the field at the back of our house this morning.
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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) # –…
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…