Daily notes

📅 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 ‘of the internet’ in the way that it’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 – networked responsibility is the role we all have as individual leaders in making this happen.

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📅 Daily Note: December 12, 2024

It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly.

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One issue with my new blogging workflow is its dependence on a WordPress custom post type – and my editor of choice, MarsEdit, doesn’t currently talk to such things.

So, am testing a bit of code to get around this. In effect, I send a ‘normal’ post to WordPress from MarsEdit, only as a draft, and in a particular category.

When WordPress receives this, it spots it, copies the content and tags to a new micropost in the custom post type.

Currently the original post is left in drafts for me to delete manually, but I’ll probably automate that once I’m confident it’s working ok.

So, a bit janky and duplicative, but it ought to work ok. Will see if there’s any unforeseen repercussions on performance or anything like that. Code is on Github, if you’d like to make use of it.

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Jeremy’s 5 reflections on his year at Homes England are interesting, wise, and definitely worth thinking over.

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📅 Daily Note: December 11, 2024

Digitisation, politicisation and the civil service by Martha Lane Fox:

Today’s reality is clear: digital skills are no longer optional extras. Data analysis, digital service design, agile project management, let alone the nuance needed in understanding new AI tools, have become as essential to governance as policy writing and stakeholder management. This shift creates real tensions within our supposedly neutral institutions.

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AI product management in high stakes domains – Alan Wright shares a bunch of approaches that have worked well for him.

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Our positions on generative AI – Steve Messer details a sensible set of stances on the ethical and effective use of LLMs and so forth.

AI is more of a concept, but generative AI as a general purpose technology has come to the fore due to recent developments in cloud-based computation and machine learning. Plus, technology is more widespread and available to more people, so more people are talking about generative AI – compared to something even more ubiquitous like HTML.

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Lloyd has written up how he is using Micro.blog and a custom script to deliver a daily summary of his micro-posting to his WordPress blog.

There’s more than one way to skin this cat!

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📅 Daily Note: December 10, 2024

Am testing a new way of doing my daily blogging. I’ve created a custom post type in WordPress, called ‘microposts’. This way, each of my ‘paragraphs‘ exist as separate items. For example, here is the permalink for this particular micropost.

I have used ChatGPT to help me produce some code that will assemble them everyday to create the ‘Daily note‘ style roundup. Will have to see how that works – expect some jankiness!

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