Roger Swannell – Getting agile governance right: In a traditional waterfall or stage-gated development process quality assurance and approval checks happen towards the end of the work. It makes sense if you’re optimising for efficiency as all the quality check…
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Nina Belk, dxw – Improving the transition from policy to delivery with service patterns: ‘Service patterns’ are reusable building blocks that help teams to design services end-to-end and front-to-back, in a coherent and consistent way, making them easier to deliver…
Dennis Vergne – The Hidden History of Relational Public Services: From the Coal Mine to the Front Door: It is not a single invention, but a recurring discovery made by different people in different decades (miners, social workers, nurses, economists,…
📅 Daily Note: December 2, 2025
Gavin Beckett – Harnessing the changing landscape of local government to create internet era organisations: Effective responses to complex, long-standing social challenges need to be co-designed and co-produced with people and community organisations that grow from the ground up. Modern…
📅 Daily Note: October 21, 2025
Sarah and Carl are taking up the reigns of LocalGovDigital – a Slack-based networks of digital practitioners in local government, and I’m stepping down. I think they’ll do a great job and am really excited about what they will be…
The core problem in local government digital is capacity
This is the content of the ‘article’ element of the email newsletter I sent last week. Publishing here for posterity. 2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year in local government digital, largely due to the impact of the Localism bill…
Localise Live! – monthly chats for local government folk
Join me for a light-hearted hour of sharing challenges, ideas, and experience about innovating in local public services. Localise Live! takes place on the last Thursday of every month at 12pm until 1pm and is open to public sector people only.…
📅 Daily Note: September 3, 2025
Brent’s Innovation Journey: Building a ‘Base’ for Local Government Innovation by Ryan Hamilton on the LOTI blog: At Brent, we’ve been trying to rethink how we tackle problems in a way that makes ‘innovation’ not just a buzzword, but a…
On user groups for local government software
Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it? It seems like vendors are keen to say…
📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025
Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service. # – micropost 22965 Ben Holliday: New ways of organising: What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard…