Daily notes

📅 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. #

📅 Daily note for 1 July 2024

Pinch, punch, first of the month.#

Am trying a thing to easily(ish) create anchor links at the end of paragraphs in these daily notes. That way I can point people directly to a specific nugget within a post. There is a very limited user need here, beyond scratching an itch, which is to try and replicate one of the ways that Dave Winer’s blogging⬈ works, and Lloyd tried a similar thing a while back⬈.

I’m aided here by the fact that I write my blogs posts in MarsEdit, a desktop app on my Mac, rather than the WordPress interface itself. MarsEdit lets me create macros assigned to keyboard shortcuts, so now when I hit ctrl-cmd-p, it plonks in opening and closing paragraph tags, and prompts me for the anchor id, which it then uses to spit out the necessary tags to make a clickable # sign at the end of the paragraph.

(A slight pain is having to type in the anchor text twice – once for the anchor and then for the link. Mistyping this will obviously lead to errors, but am not sure how to get around it.)

I think it works – try it out on this paragraph and let me know how much of a waste of time this was! #

What this hopefully will mean is that, rather than waiting until the end of the day to publish these notes, I can publish it after the first item is written, and then update it during the day. Having the anchor links means if I want to point to a specific thing before the end of the day, I can.#

Not a lot to argue about in this article⬈ on building “21st century digital government” – data and interoperability are jolly important. But the click-baity headline means that it’s presented as the only answer, and we know that – as important as data etc is – it’s isn’t the only thing organisations need to be focusing on. I don’t think anyone would argue that rather obvious point, but the danger is that some less informed folk might read this as being a ‘data will solve everything’ argument, meaning that the other stuff gets missed.

Basically, everything is complicated.#

I’ve ordered a new desk chair, on the recommendation of Ann Kempster⬈. Thanks Ann! This one isn’t too big, so won’t dominate the room, and most importantly, it won’t bankrupt the shareholders of SensibleTech Ltd⬈. I asked for suggestions on Bluesky and LinkedIn – feels as if questions like that are ideally suited to social networks. #

Speaking of LinkedIn, it does seem to be continuing its march towards replacing Xwitter as the best place to get work-related engagement going. Noticed a few people writing fairly lengthy piece as ‘posts’ rather than ‘articles’ – would be interested to know what difference this makes, as both require a click to read the bulk of the text. Might try an A/B test to check it at some point.

The URLs for posts rather than articles are very ugly, and it’s a poorer reading experience for people who aren’t logged in or have an account.

Another thought: posting these daily notes in their entirety to a LinkedIn post, rather than just linking to them? 🤔#

Here is one such LinkedIn post⬈, an excellent one from Adrian Lent, in which he proposes what those wishing to see radical change in public services ought to do:

I think history is clear on what works. Those who want change must come together, work out a shared vision of generalised reform and then press for it as determinedly as possible. In effect, creating a movement within the public sector for system transformation.

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This is a lovely post from Jukesie⬈ about his love affair with libraries, and his inspiring decision to start volunteering. #

Steve recently started sharing his blogroll⬈ – a rather old school blogging concept of maintain a public list of blogs you like to read, to encourage others to find them and share theirs.

Was reminded of this when I came across this post from Dave Winer⬈, sharing an automated way of finding blogs from blogrolls, and then finding more blogs from those blogrolls, and so on – all thanks to a defined standard. Nice.

(I just noticed that one of Steve’s posts mentions Winer’s standard too – I must have missed that at the time!) #

📅 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.

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