Daily notes

šŸ“… Daily note for 17 September 2024

How Rushmoor Borough Council set out to understand and resolve the issues preventing an effective and efficient freedom of information request serviceā¬ˆ. #

Have ordered a copy of Platformlandā¬ˆ, Richard Pope’s book on government digital services. Am looking forward to reading it and nodding. Lots of people have their copies already and seem to be enjoying it. #

Work on the rebrandā¬ˆ is progressing – there’s not a lot holding me back now really, except nerves. Which is daft! Who cares, after all? Only me really. #

I use a Blue Yetiā¬ˆ microphone at my desk, and it really does have a positive impact on audio quality, which is great. But it also takes up a lot of space, so I have ordered a microphone armā¬ˆ to see if that helps declutter things a bit. #

Needed another browser (I like having different accounts in completely different browsers, rather than multiple windows of the same browser. I get easily confused!) So I went for the DuckDuckGoā¬ˆ browser. It’s really good – nice and fast, and all the privacy stuff is good although I’m not overly worried about that stuff. Definitely recommended. #

šŸ” Moving house

Well, we have moved. It wasn’t an entirely joyful process, but we got everything shifted on the Friday 6th and by teatime Saturday most things were in their rightful places. It’s a bit galling because this is very much a temporary, interim, move, until the house we really want to live in becomes available. So, we can’t get too comfy. #

We were without broadband until last Friday (13th), and there’s no 4g signal on my phone in the house. The only network with any coverage at all round here is 3, so I bought a SIM on moving day, whacked it into a venerable mifi type unit and we tried to all to work from that for a week. It was slow going, and the application that didn’t cope at all was MS Teams, interestingly. #

I went to find somewhere with wifi to work one afternoon. Managed to find myself in the one Costa in the world with worse wifi than the house did at that time. #

We’ve moved to West Winch, a small village in Norfolk, just to the south of King’s Lynn. Funnily enough, King’s Lynn is where I started my local government careerā¬ˆ, as a housing benefits assessor back in 2003. The online process to sign up for council tax worked a treat, so well done, Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk! #

The other weird thing is that, like Lloyd’sā¬ˆ, this blog is 20 years old this year. And when I started it, I was living in… King’s Lynn. The circle closes. #

šŸ“… Daily note for 5 September 2024

We are moving house again this week. Lucky enough to have removals folk helping us, they are here packing boxes today, then the big shift happens next week. No broadband til the 13th, so that will be interesting! I hate moving, it’s the kind of disruption and change that I find incredibly unsettling. #

I love the idea of Emily’s planning gameā¬ˆ. Reminds me of the good old days of the digital engagement game (dead links ahoy in that post, btw). After last week’s workshopping, I fancy doing something new along those lines for the work I am focusing on at the moment. #

Working in the open is good for youā¬ˆ:

Working in the open in the public sector could really do with a renewed, optimistic case for it. By working in the open, I mean teams thinking out loud, announcing product changes theyā€™re trialling, sharing good practice, stuff like that.

via Roger Swannellā¬ˆ. #

šŸ“… Daily note for 4 September 2024

Charlie Fountaine kicked offā¬ˆ one of those conversations on LinkedIn:

Why isn’t there a cookie-cutter website for local councils in the UK?…Imagine if we had a common system, similar to central governmentā€™s approach, with shared components and a unified content management system. Councils could save time and money, focusing on improving services rather than reinventing the wheel.

I couldn’t help but dive in, naturally…

I think the days of individual council websites are probably numbered – it isn’t justifiable for 300 organisations to be recreating – mostly quite poorly – the same website over and over again when they are cutting funding on social care and housing, etc. It’d be lovely if there was the money for each and every council to have their own, high quality website, but sadly that isn’t the reality and the sooner decision makers get their heads around that the better.

Do I think all local authority websites ought to be folded into GOV.UK? Probably not. There is a place for some sense of local identity I think for council run services.

But I do think that having 300-odd organisations spending public money building, designing and writing content for websites over and over again is not the best way to be doing things. LocalGovDrupal is a start when it comes to sharing software, but there are still too many costs involved in running it if you don’t have a well stocked tech team. We need a turnkey solution that any council of any size can just start using.

Content needs a focus – so much of the words on council websites are basically the same. Write it once, write it well, and let – or make councils reuse it.

Then move onto online services – establish patterns, build them out in a handful of common platforms, and then make councils use them. If it means standardising some process, so be it, was long as local policy can be reflected in configuration.

There’s a bunch of middle ways between the current fragmented, duplicative, and poor quality mess we are currently in, and a fully centralised single website for all local councils, and in that middle ground the answer will be. Maybe it’s regional working, maybe it’s allowing councils choice between several competing platforms, based on clear and open standards for service patterns, content, and layout etc. #

Another great video from Mark Thompson on how public services can benefit from radical reform in the way they use technology:

#

šŸ“… Daily note for 3 September 2024

August was not the chilled out month I was hoping for! Took a week off for staycationing but otherwise was nose to the grindstone on really exciting work, but work nonetheless. Hoping to be able to poke my head up above the parapet more over the next few weeks! #

One of the things I have been working on is a rebrand of my consultancy business, SensibleTech. Iā€™ve never been hugely keen on the name, and the current website is basically an embarrassment!

So, am rebranding it to Localise, emphasising my almost-total devotion to local public services, and with an awful lot of help from Stephā¬ˆ, Iā€™ve been wrangling with WordPress to give a better account of what I actually do these days – embedding stuff like the digital quality model and my strategy framework into something vaguely coherent. Launching soon, but hereā€™s a sneaky peak:

Localise preview.

Of course, I know that most people don’t care one jot about this – for the meantime Localise will remain very much Dave Briggs Incorporated – but I think this new brand gives me more of a chance to grow the business, should I choose to in the future. #

Working with a client last week, I ran a new exercise in a face to face workshop which I called Empathy and Efficiency.

It combines producing an empathy mapā¬ˆ for a person using a service with an ā€˜efficiency mapā€™ which looks at things from the councilā€™s perspective. Once both are complete, you are able to compare them and spot areas of alignment, and – perhaps more importantly – where the clashes are.

It is obviously incredibly important to consider user needs, and design around them. But itā€™s also vital that the organisationā€™s needs are also met – whether statutory, financial, or political. Otherwise, whatā€™s the point?

I think it worked well, and at some point I’ll tweak it and share some templates, etc. #

Shape the market and buy better stuffā¬ˆ by Catherine Howe – a proper digital leader if ever there was one:

I am constantly struck by how often we in local government are forced to buy poor technology. For all the brilliant digital work done over the last decade we as a sector seem remarkably content to put up with badly designed stuff that is built on legacy architecture which is badly translated to the cloud.

Itā€™s simplistic (though tempting!) to blame client side skills gaps for our purchasing decisions and I think thats part of it. I think itā€™s also down to us not creating an internal appetite for better technology ā€“ once you give people an awareness that something better is possible then they will be more demanding.

It’s an important point, brilliantly made, and one I have been wrestling with over the summer a great deal. #

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