Daily notes

📅 Daily note for 28 June 2024

I’m back! First daily note in a while. Hope you are as pleased with me as I am 😁

The blog has been rehosted, meaning I can save a bit of money shutting down an old hosting account. Have also changed the theme, going from the venerable Twenty-Fifteen⏈ which has served me well for a long old while.

I’ve gone for GeneratePress⏈, which is a very bare-bones (the idea being that you can customise it to do whatever you like). I’m just tweaking it here and there to keep things light and simple. I’ve avoided blog-tinkering for a while, but it’s quite nice to change things up.

I’ve tried to trim down the number of RSS feeds I am checking on the regular in NetNewsWire⏈. Am subscribed to over 400 but huge numbers of those are inactive these days, and others I rarely check. So, have split them into two folders, Must reads and Nice to reads. The latter stays shut unless I’m desperate for something to look at!

Eddie Copeland posted an interesting aside⏈ on language and how he isn’t using the word digital much, and it seems to be working for him. Fair enough! I’m a bit horses-for-courses on this one really, sometimes it can be a helpful word, sometimes not. Depends on the organisation’s context I guess.

When I do say ‘digital’ these days though, I invariably follow it up by saying that it is a simple shorthand for technology, data, and online experience.

I love this quote from Matt King in his post the future of digital is already here⏈:

Working in public sector digital environments can often involve an almost disorientating sense of deja-vu, where a chance phrase drops you deep into a flashback to the previous times you had a similar conversation. When this first happens, it’s tempting to think that you’re getting old, and that either that the organisation you’re working with has ignored the last 15 years, or that the case for digital change is doomed. The reality is usually that none of these things apart from the getting old bit is true, and that the organisation you’re dealing with is both ahead of the curve in a few places and has missed some stuff in other places. The future of digital is not very evenly distributed at the moment – it’s pretty bumpy – but what we’ll see in the next 15 years is that distribution improving.

Going down to London and speaking at the Town Hall 2030 launch on Tuesday was pretty exhausting but also inspiring. I love the fact that the lens for quite a few big beast policy types is now on local public service delivery.

With the likely new government on its way, it feels like a very optimistic time, which is a very nice feeling to have. I came away with many thoughts that I will try and wrangle into posts in the near future.

Does this actually work? #

📅 Weekly note for 5-9 February 2024

This started off as a daily not for Monday, and has been sat in draft all week as I add more and more to it…

Had a proper chance to watch this and read about it – “Place-Based Public Service Budgets: Making Public Money Work Better for Communities”. Nice bit of big picture thinking around local public services. We need more of this sort of thing.

Bluesky is now open for anyone to join. No more invite codes! It’s like Twitter used to be. See you there?

This is rather lovely from dxw – “Content design: the very first step”.

Looking at Beehiiv as a potential Substack replacement. That spelling though, yikes.

Talking of which, I sent out the first newsletter of the year this week.

Resetting digital government – this piece from Jerry Fishenden has attracted a lot of attention.

In Neil’s recent week note, he linked to a bunch of interesting approaches:

Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany.

This is an interesting piece about YouTube and how content creators chase the revenue, resulting in a worse experience for viewers, and how this is resonant of the way the web went.

Nice video from Giles Turnbull, giving a talk to folk from the state government in British Columbia about using the human voice in communication.

📅 Daily note for 26 January 2024

Remember my course! It might be really helpful for you or a colleague!

Excellent podcast about what Iran is up to these days.

Giles thinks learning materials in organisations ought to be better quality, and of course he is right.

Simon Wardley shares some thoughts on project delivery that are well worth reading.

The Future Councils Playbook is a “set of tools to help you understand complex problems and their impact”. These are useful of course, and as much good practice support we can get out there the better. But a step change in local government digital quality is unlikely to result from such things – we need more.

More Simon Wardley – this is a fun new intro to his mapping, etc:

Yesterday I made use of Colin Stenning’s excellent local gov CMS research to help write an options appraisal for a council’s new website technology. What a legend!

Daily note for 22 January 2024

I am running a 6 week online course about making a success of digital in your organisation. You can find out more and book on the SensibleTech website.

Neil Lawrence’s GovCamp write up (Medium, meh).

AI, data, and public services from Jerry Fishenden:

But technology alone can’t solve complex political, social, and economic problems. And that includes AI. Its evangelists conveniently overlook significant problems with accountability and discrimination, the inherent tendency of some AI models to hallucinate and falsify, and an eye-watering environmental impact. And then add into this toxic mix the inaccurate and derivative nature of systems like ChatGPT…

…Along with the need for a less hyperbolic and more scientific approach to AI itself, the current state of government data isn’t exactly ideal for implementing AI given it relies on access to high quality, accurate data and metadata. But the National Audit Office reports that government “data quality is poor” and “a lack of standards across government has led to inconsistent ways of recording the same data.”

“User Centred IT: Why ‘best practice’ isn’t good enough in the domain of IT” (via NeillyNeil).

“Sharing our learning from SDinGov 2023” – some lovely nuggets in here from the service transformation team at Essex County Council.

The stuff Jukesie uses.

Daily note for 19 January 2024

A minor innovation in these daily notes – pulling out the occasional quote from some of the links, and then using a horizontal line to provide some separation. Also using the lines to make it clear when a multiple-paragraph comment from me is over.

Like this!:

“I Made This”:

In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and consumers. We don’t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was connected before, but we also can’t just leave it dangling. The historical practice of conferring ownership based on the act of creation still seems sound, but that means we must be able to unambiguously identify that act. And if the same act (absent any prior legal arrangements) confers ownership in one context but not in another, then perhaps it’s not the best candidate.

“Designing service at scale” – loads of good reflection and advice in here.

Cool? No. Useful? Probably!

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