Adrian Imms at the University of Sussex with a whole host of helpful thoughts following their experience significantly reducing the number of editors of the corporate website: In early February, we finally managed to centralise the editing of our public…

Will Callaghan – who knows more about this stuff than most – shares his thoughts on how to be a better collaborator, based on his experience with the LocalGovDrupal project.

Lovely to see the new people joining the team in Luton, and introducing themselves on the blog. Welcome to my old pal Kev Rowe 😀

Simon Millier from Adur & Worthing Councils reports on progress with open digital planning (Medium warning): It’s been a busy and productive period for our multi-disciplinary team. As usual we’re balancing the Open Digital Planning project alongside day-to-day business as…

This is neat: Gazette is a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers.

Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure: A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to…

The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns. It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in…

Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running: AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your…

Multiplayer snake in a terminal window, you say? Why not.

Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms: Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that…

Ben Carpenter shares some recent updates to the service standard (LinkedIn warning): We’ve made it extra clear in ‘Solve a whole problem for users’ and ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ that existing principles to design around users and not…

Interesting writing project from Ben Welby – The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World: Public service teams are at a kairos moment: a time when a new technical capability invites us to rethink almost everything…

This is so good – Richard Pope has shared the detail as well as the slides for a talk on how his Platformland ideas should be applied to the NHS’ 10-year Plan. Loads to apply across the whole spectrum of…

Harry Metcalfe shares a cautionary tale of vibe coding and security: But the arrival of these tools has – like all development tools that help get more done more easily – raised the security stakes. Tools like Lovable make building…

The legendary email client power users wouldn’t let die: Eudora was, from the very beginning, quirky software built for power users. Like a film director who respects their audience, skipping over exposition and letting them fill in the blanks. It’s…

Mist is an ephemeral, collaborative markdown editor in the browser. Handy!

Doug Belshaw – I needed a scheduling tool that respects privacy. So I built one: Scheduler reads iCal feeds, so it works with Proton Calendar or any service supporting iCal/CalDAV standards. It doesn’t store calendar data, instead checking availability in…

Emily Webber – A New Communities of Practice Model for Organisational Maturity: This new model focuses on organisational maturity at five levels from low awareness to self-sustaining and setting standards across six dimensions (structure, culture, collaboration, support, technology and impact).…

Tom Loosemore published some thoughts about public services and AI on LinkedIn: Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible. This is both unfair and…

Missed this first time around, but there’s some interesting stuff to think about in here – Courage is required for GDS Local to succeed. There is currently both a real opportunity and a grave danger facing local government in England…