Daily notes

📅 Daily note for 9 July 2024

Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLG⬈ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSIT⬈ (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) which is potentially exciting.

It will be interesting to see where the Local Digital programme ends up – staying in the policy department or moving across with all the digital teams? #

UK Authority reports⬈ on Birmingham City Council extending their contract with Oracle, despite it being a pretty disastrous relationship thus far. I commented on LinkedIn, and am pasting here for posterity:

Am not sure what their alternative was, to be fair. They have to have a system to do this stuff, and signing with another supplier would mean starting the whole implementation process again on top of the licensing costs – and I can’t see how that would offer better value for tax payers.

Also we have to bear in mind that Birmingham has a budget of £3.2 BILLION – using the standard ERP estimate of 1-3% of budget, means anything in the range of £12 – £36 million.

This is an exceptional case and the numbers have to be huge. I personally think a big issue here originally was the fact that the budget was nowhere near big enough in the first place – which of course means that the original business case was fantasy stuff…

Personally, I would be glad if no council ever bought Oracle ever again. But in this specific case, the reason things went so badly wrong were not entirely the fault of the technology vendor:

  1. the decision to replace the existing system, chasing a highly speculative ‘transformation’ dream – based on a recommendation made by a certain consultancy firm that ought to have known better
  2. a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
  3. a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
  4. massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
  5. a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.

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How Rushmoor Borough Council have saved money on printing and posting⬈. #

This is really interesting from Richard Pope⬈:

Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.

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📅 Daily note for 8 July 2024

In the middle of a house move, so am working on my laptop rather than my main computer, and am on the sofa – my new desk doesn’t arrive until Wednesday!

The computing revolution: How the next government can transform society with ethics, education and equity in technology – the British Computer Society’s vision for technology under the new government.

It mostly seems to involve more people being chartered… with the British Computer Society 🤷‍♂️

“I Will F**king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” – my thoughts exactly. This post has been doing the rounds a lot, but that’s because it’s good!

Bear seems an interesting lightweight blogging platform.

📅 Daily note for 7 July 2024

A Sunday daily note! A rarity indeed. I’m not using my usual computer today, which means that I don’t have MarsEdit and thus this post does not sport any paragraph links. Let me know how little you care in the comments! 🙂

Following my wittering about online communities on Friday, I came across this post from David Durant⬈, which is very thoughtful and wise.

While catching up on David’s recent blogging, i also came across this post about GDS’s registers project⬈. It’s a really interesting read.

It’s a shame that David’s posts are on Medium – they are very good and deserve a wide audience. But I find the Medium reading experience diabolical these days.

I posted on Bluesky⬈ whether there might be a need for a multi-author blog, where occasional bloggers could publish posts, but on a platform that was open, and without all the guff that comes from Medium.

Technically it would be very simple, just a WordPress instance with a clean, clear theme on it. People could sign up and after a very brief vetting to ensure they are publicly spirited types, they could post to it whenever they felt the need. Could be like a training ground for new bloggers, who don’t quite want to take the leap of having a whole site dedicated to themselves.

I dunno, it’s an idea, I guess. Jukesie wasnt sure⬈, but I do wonder if it will help some folks, and most importantly, get others off Medium!

Vicky writes about the “lost practice of information architecture⬈”:

I increasingly see designers start designing complex websites or repeat-use services by going straight to high fidelity screens. To me, this suggests that they haven’t been told about the need to consider structure, and how to make tradeoffs on different tasks serving different user groups (to use an information architecture analogy, like designing a flow for a supermarket or shopping mall). I’ve also come to feel that if I can’t find a sitemap for an existing repeat use service it’s likely no one else thought about structure from a user’s perspective either.

📅 Daily note for 4 July 2024

Have added Google Analytics to this blog, via the Sitekit WordPress plugin. I guess it will be interesting to see the numbers, but it isn’t really why I do this, so maybe I’ll switch it off again once the novelty wears off. #

Audree Fletcher posted a little while back about Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problems⬈:

I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what you’re going to get for your money. It’s what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.

But it only works when you are really certain that the thing you’re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes you’re seeking.

Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.

Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.

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I posted an article yesterday about writing good strategies, based on some of the work I have been doing lately. Also copy and pasted it into LinkedIn, and will send it out on a newsletter at some point too. #

A lovely chat with James⬈ this morning, rather out of the blue. It was great to catch up and share stories about what we’ve been up to for the last 10 years, or however long it was since we last spoke. We talked a lot about online communities – particularly of practice – and shared a bunch of experiences and ideas. He reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about, like the GDS community development handbook⬈. #

The community development framework⬈ sets out the things that communities need really well: people, programme, and platform. I do struggle with the latter, nothing seems to work terribly well, particularly when it comes to making it easy to extract knowledge out of discussions and into some kind of searchable archive. I’ve not expressed this very well, but I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that a large language model type thing might actually be useful for. #

Have just come across this great blog⬈ from a local government technology person. They don’t mention their name on their blog, so I won’t do it on mine. Well worth a read and a subscribe though! #

Richard Pope⬈ has a book in the works⬈! Exciting! #

📅 Daily note for 2 July 2024

Kiasmos⬈ have been providing some of my favourite beepy-boopy music of recent times. They have a newish album out⬈, which is excellent. My favourite track of theirs, though, is still Looped⬈ from their 2015 debut album:

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We had the July edition of LocalGovDigital Live!⬈ This morning. We were meant to have a session on the Open Referral Standard but sadly Jukesie was poorly and couldn’t make it. So, we had more of an open discussion instead. Think it went ok, although personally I think these things work best with a proper presentation of some sort. #

Stefan pointed out⬈ – quite rightly – that my idea for publishing a daily note and then adding to it throughout the day will be terrible for a lot of RSS subscribing types. This is because RSS feeds don’t tend to appear as new when they have been edited, only on publishing. So, I won’t do that! #

Somehow I missed this post⬈ when it appeared a couple of weeks ago. The digital folk at Birmingham are continuing to do some amazing work despite the financial situation they find themselves in.

Finding ways like this to improve the small tactical stuff is really important. Doesn’t take away the need to focus on big picture, long term structural change – but having both running in parallel means people are seeing results and improvements all the time. Good for morale! #

The linking-to-paragraphs solution I figured out yesterday has made my mind spin a few times around what other bits of blogging heavy lifting could be done on my desktop rather than server-side. Suddenly a switch has been flicked and I kind of understand the appeal of flat file blogging engines, like Jekyll⬈ etc. #

Another little presentational tweak to the blog – post titles now have an emoji prefixing them, as a guide to what they contain. So daily notes have a calendar, links posts a link (duh!), longer pieces an open book, techie bits a person behind a laptop, and a TV screen for video posts. Am doing this manually at the moment, suspect there would be a way to automate it but I can’t be faffed. #

The complexity is the attraction – reflections on trying to use crypto⬈ – interesting stuff from Terence Eden, especially this:

I don’t need to know how the underlying infrastructure works. I don’t need to understand how the global financial system works. But, with crypto, I need to understand staking, gas fees, bridges, offramps, DeFi, and a dozen other things. This is stupid. It makes insiders feel smart because they have embraced the self-created complexity, and allows them to feel smug that normal people aren’t as smart. That’s it. That’s why some people love crypto.

I suspect this may be true of other technologies, too. #

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