📅 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!


📅 Daily note for 22 November 2024

Whoops, forgot to hit publish on Friday. #


Another kerr-azy week of having too much to do and too little time and energy to do it. #


A short post I put up on LinkedIn (and published here and on Localise⬈ as an archive) blew up in a modest way. It even attracted a comment on a blog post! Good heavens. Does feel like there is a gap here to be filled by something. #


Atika has started her CDO type role at Luton Council and she’s published the first blog post⬈ on the Council’s brand new blog in her first week! An inspiration to us all – this is how you impact on culture early. #


Ben Holliday: Analogue because of digital⬈:

My concern is that the default solution to this type of reform will be more technology. However, we still have a greater need for more joined up systems that make better use of existing technology. This includes recognising that not all legacy technology is bad. Dare I say, even some of the pagers and the fax machines.

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Alan Wright’s favourite tools for analysing user and product data⬈ #


📅 Daily note for 11 November 2024

My ongoing search for the perfect ‘everything bucket’ has led me to UpNote⬈. It looks good, but expect me to never mention it again. #


Against the standardisation of product management⬈ by Roger Swannell. Am stealing this:

standardise where interoperability is required, otherwise optimise for innovation

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From ideals to realities: navigating complexities in adult social care⬈ from dxw.

Due to our short timescale, it was clear that following the perfect co-design methodology wasn’t practical. However, we didn’t want to abandon the concept completely and risk the solution not being fit for purpose. This meant we had to rethink and focus on what we could do in the time available.

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GOV.UK Forms in motion⬈:

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