Daily notes

šŸ“… Daily Note: July 25, 2025

I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster:

Every few months I set aside time for a ā€œrandom revisitā€. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, and find inspiration in past thoughts. Itā€™s also an opportunity to do maintenance, like fix formatting based on new rules in my personal style guide.

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Local Government Association Cyber Incident Grab Bag for Local Authorities – Public Digital.

Along with other public services and businesses, cyber threats pose a significant risk for local authorities. The LGA wanted to provide practical support that could assist councils needing to respond to a serious cyber incident. They also wanted to make sure that the product clearly articulates how cyber security is a team sport, emphasising how a strong response hinges on collective strength.

 

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Is it just me or are other people still putting ‘please’ in their AI prompts?

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šŸ“… Daily Note: July 15, 2025

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Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather

We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as vital skills for leadership

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Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing the Public Internet.

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šŸ“… Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service.

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Ben Holliday: New ways of organising:

Whatā€™s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. Itā€™s hard to point to places that we can truly call service organisations, at least outside of individual policy areas or transformation programmes.

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Jukesie – The Open Continuum:

Working in the open can seem scary and a bit all or nothing. I suspect I do not help with this with my stories of the extreme ups and downs of the practice and certainly there is some riskā€¦not as much as is often feared but it is there.

Being open is not one size fits all though. There are levels to it and significant benefits at each of them ā€“ plus you build your muscles, instincts and a thicker skin if you work your way up to going all-out.

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šŸ“… Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the governmentā€™s missions”.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ā€˜administrative burdensā€™, one by one.

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How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!

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Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).

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James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself

Iā€™m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ā€˜bureaucracy is brokenā€™, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.

These are thoughtful people, so their point isnā€™t that everything in government is broken. Theyā€™re just saying that the problem runs deep ā€” that itā€™s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.

If thatā€™s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.

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Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.

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šŸ“… Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working.

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My general take these days is that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

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Ben Unsworth points out that I haven’t installed the free and open source Caffeine on my Mac. How foolish of me.

Have rectified that and will amend the post at some point to include it.

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Ben Holliday on ‘networked responsibility’:

Digital transformation has to be a people movement. And it has to be ā€˜of the internetā€™ in the way that itā€™s networked, open, and has the potential to self-sustain how ideas and solutions work in joined-up ways across systems and layers of government ā€“ networked responsibility is the role we all have as individual leaders in making this happen.

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