Daily notes

Another newsletter went out today: https://www.davebriggs.email/p/daveslist-volume-3-issue-4

“Teaching agility, not Agile™” https://medium.com/@rchatley/teaching-agility-not-agile-a69ed6644682

Ooooooh: “Open Working 101” https://medium.com/we-are-cast/open-working-101-f8fa10385061

Daughter was telling me this morning about dog and cat based ASMR videos, and I said I really don’t think that was what TBL had in mind when he invented the web and she said dad, you’re so old.

Ben Unsworth, talking about digital transformation in local government. What’s not to like? https://open.spotify.com/episode/5dwqlqSqoRlZ1zJiB8xr9t

Stockport Council asks “How can we use data to help support people to leave hospital when safe and appropriate to do so?” https://www.digitalstockport.info/how-can-we-use-data-to-help-support-people-to-leave-hospital-when-safe-and-appropriate-to-do-so/

The Digital Inclusion Toolkit is looking for sponsors. If you can, you should: https://digitalinclusionkit.org/digital-inclusion-news/sponsor-the-digital-inclusion-toolkit/

Am stepping things up a bit with localgov.blog. Have coerced Steph Gray into helping me migrate and upgrade the whole thing, and set up a Basecamp site (still my favourite online collaboration thingy) to get all the users in one conversation to help me understand better what they need.

My Bluesky experience so far has been mostly terrible. I really don’t like the website interface – it feels like something I might have put together myself. Notifications fail to clear, and the same posts are always just there for some reason. I don’t follow enough people, is no doubt part of the problem.

It was our son’s graduation yesterday. So proud! But also, how did that happen? I’m so old!

On Saturday we watched the new Indiana Jones film. Very silly of course but it did capture some of the fun of the originals, which I was just mad keen on when I was a kid.

I used ChatGPT to build myself a simple flat file homepage to point to the various places I exist online. It’s remarkably easy to just feed it a few prompts and then tweak as necessary. Am sure I will keep fiddling, but it’s a start, and was so easy! https://www.davebriggs.xyz/

I really agree with Terence Eden on this https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/discord-is-not-documentation/ – and not just because I personally find Discord impossible to navigate!

I think this is true of a lot of online communities too – there’s that concept which was spoken about a lot 15 years ago (remember Wikipatterns? https://stewartmader.com/wikipatterns/ ), but now not so often, of online community ‘gardeners’ – people who’d tidy conversations up, retrieve and keep the good stuff where everyone could find it, and not allow knowledge to be lost or forgotten.

Viola the Bird is quite a strange thing https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/nAEJVwNkp-FnrQ

Said this a few time this week – you can do amazing work with a good team, good culture, plenty of enthusiasm and terrible tech. With great tech and rubbish everything else, not so much.

Have made it onto Bluesky, just in time for it to die probably. But if you are there, come say hello! https://bsky.app/profile/davebriggs.bsky.social. Thanks to Jukesie for the invite code 🙂

This is good from TPX Impact – feels like we need a lot more of this kind of analysis across local gov: https://www.tpximpact.com/knowledge-hub/insights/harnessing-potential-social-housing-technology/

It’s almost like we need something kind of Gartner-esque but focusing on the technology and services providers working with local government. We ask why the same old vendors are so successful, but really, why wouldn’t they? Where’s the independent advice coming from?

A take on Twitter that is worth sharing if only for it’s remarkable length: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline

I’m getting some good reaction to the regular blogging here, and I think the newsletter is going alright, although it’s early days for that. What I have not done in a while is any longer, advisory type blogging, which usually gets posted over at https://sensibletech.co.uk/ – and I probably ought to do some of that soon.

Another newsletter went out this morning: https://daveslist.substack.com/p/daves-list-vol-3-issue-3

ClassicPress is WordPress like it used to be https://www.classicpress.net/

For years I lived in Evernote. This by Harry McCracken captures some of what made it great https://www.technologizer.com/2023/07/09/for-your-eyes-only-my-unedited-2013-time-magazine-story-about-evernote/

I knew vaguely of Vivian Stanshall, but I definitely know more having read this: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/12/on-best-behaviour-he-was-a-joy-the-lost-archive-of-english-pop-eccentric-vivian-stanshall

I like this! “Build your own “On This Day” page for WordPress” https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/build-your-own-on-this-day-page-for-wordpress/

I had the pleasure earlier this week to speak for the first time to Doug Belshaw. I have been following Doug’s stuff online for years and always found it useful and interesting. Never actually spoken though, so it was lovely to do so. I recommend it! https://dougbelshaw.com/about/

I just can’t help myself. It’s like a sickness https://t2.social/davebriggs

Episode 2 of our daughter Jade’s podcast is out. It’s all about the job of being a social media manager at an agency. It’s good! https://shows.acast.com/the-social-sisters-podcast/episodes/episode-2-what-does-a-social-media-manager-actually-do

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I’ve read more about David Foster Wallace than I have David Foster Wallace. This is a great piece: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now

Ben Thompson on Threads and the state of social media: https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communications-map/