An open working masterclass from Cumberland Council: Running a show and tell? ✅ Recording it so others can watch it? ✅ Publishing it on your intranet? ✅ The area of the intranet that anyone on the web can access? ✅…

WhatCable is a simple, free Mac app to tell you wha the USB-C cable is that you have plugged in. Can it carry data? How much wattage is it capable of? WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and…

LOTI is 7 years old and Eddie rightly celebrates, and also teases about the future: That’s why LOTI is now planning its most ambitious initiative to date: to establish a Centre for New Public Services. The aim is to give…

Cathy Dutton – The portal trap: When portals are treated as containers they fail. You can’t cover up the complexity, and attempting to do so just adds another layer of abstraction and frustration. If portals are instead built as a…

Have been using Dropover this week, and it’s great. A Mac app that pops up a little shelf for you to drop whatever you are currently dragging onto, so you can then find the place you want to permanently drop…

Laura points to this post on how to build a community calendar, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. I wonder if some of it would be useful for the ORUK crowd? But the choice of technology quickly becomes secondary…

As if by magic, the mighty Will has also posted on improving local government software today, and I heartily recommend you taking a few minutes out to read what he has to say. Rather than cover every possible market shaping…

Steve Messer – Is testing and learning a methodology or a core skill?: Experimentation and adaption is only mentioned in the Agile and Lean section, and only in the context of ways of working. But testing & learning is a…

New resource on the digital LGR playbook – Priorities at each phase of reorganisation: This resource sets out common phases councils that have been through LGR have experienced. It is not a mandated timeline and does not replace the wider…

Tom Loosemore – Prompt injection and the perils of leaving it to AI to handle AI: A petition filed to a Brazilian labour court contained hidden instructions for any AI used by the court to contest the petition only superficially,…

Tinydot looks like a fun little service. A Mac app sits on your computer watching a folder. Anything you put into that folder appears on your Tinydot site, as if by magic! Markdown files, photos, etc all work. No idea…

Matt Billingsley from Content Design London – What 6 FOI requests reveal about government campaign websites: Departments treated these websites as communications products rather than services, which meant they did not need to meet GOV.UK’s Service Standard. The MoJ said…

Stephen Mounsey on standards: That matters because some constraints are good constraints. They protect the basics. They stop us reinventing things we do not need to reinvent. They make it easier to reuse what already works. They can create pace,…

A new book from Public Digital: The Intelligence Era Organisation – Creating the Conditions to Thrive in the Age of AI. If you are a senior leader responsible for transformation and AI adoption in an established organisation, you’ll undoubtedly recognise…

I really like the framing of digital leadership as a form of gardening in this post: I think of digital capabilities as the plants that we are trying to grow throughout our organisation’s digital garden, its culture. Sometimes we need…

The National Audit Office have published a Good practice guide for organisations using AI: This guide highlights key considerations for audit and risk assurance committees when overseeing the planning, deployment and scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) within public sector organisations.…

Another update from the Luton low code team on building out a system for managing complaints and other feedback. Have seen this in action and it is really impressive. More impressive, in fact, than Kev’s joke. Part of the difficulty…

The Local Government Digital Standard website

I have finally finished putting all the material for the LGDS onto a website to make it a bit easier to get to grips with. Am still working through a couple of bits of feedback, but everything you need to…

Giles points to a bunch of interesting things, including: Moments – a very bare bones photo sharing thing Lettera – yet another Mac Markdown editor

The Luton team show you can blog about anything, including the rollout of new printers. Over the last few months, the DDaT team have been working on the refresh of the council’s fleet of printers with Ricoh being the new…