Daily notes

šŸ“… Daily Note: August 7, 2025

AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI.

# – micropost 22995

Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”.

# – micropost 22996

# – micropost 22997

Service mapping: building transparency, trust and transformation together on the Public Digital blog.

Service maps arenā€™t just tools – theyā€™re catalysts for transformation. They clarify complexity, foster collaboration and enable informed decision-making. They help organisations navigate the challenges of transforming and continuously improving their services. We worked with Defraā€™s Farming and Countryside Programme (FCP) to develop a service map and a set of service outcomes.

# – micropost 22998

Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps by Maarten Dalmijn:

Your roadmap is like an indicator species that reveals all the organizational dysfunctions in your organization. The roadmap is where business and tech meet, where your vision and strategy collide with your execution and teams. The roadmap is where departments and business units compete with your teams and other organizational priorities.

via Steve.

# – micropost 22999

Steve Messer: Donā€™t just keep the lights on, shine bright:

Platform products, built by government for public sector organisations, are intended to be better, cheaper and preferable to competitors. If an arms-length body or small government organisation has to choose between a private-sector platform or a platform built by government, both of those platforms are in a market. The arms-length body will choose which platform to use based on the features offered, the price, the complexity of integration, design, accessibility, and loads of other factors.

# – micropost 23001

Alan Wright – Jobs to be Done surveys:

As a product manager, one of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The best way to get this data is by having conversations with many users, but this is not always something users have time for. Surveys are a great complimentary method to gather this data quantitatively and quickly. In this post, I share the thinking behind the Jobs to be Done survey I have been running with users in my current role.

# – micropost 23002

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.

# – micropost 22976

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.

 

# – micropost 22980

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

# – micropost 22983

šŸ“… Daily Note: July 15, 2025

# – micropost 22969

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

# – micropost 22970

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

# – micropost 22971

šŸ“… Daily Note: July 14, 2025

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

# – micropost 22965

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.

# – micropost 22966

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.

# – micropost 22967

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.

# – micropost 22941

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?!

# – micropost 22953

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).

# – micropost 22954

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.

# – micropost 22957

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

# – micropost 22960

Load more posts!