Claire Craig from the Essex Digital Service on User research in libraries: finding the voices between the bookshelves We’re currently working through a research project, exploring Essex residents’ thoughts and feelings about AI being used in public services. We’ve recruited…

New book from Public Digital, might well be worth an order: Shaping technology for transformation.

Carol from the team at Luton blogs about the new telephony system implementation: When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how…

The LGA have released their toolkit for local government reorganisation (LGR). There’s not much digital in it – largely because that will be covered in detail in MHCLG’s DDaT LGR playbook, which I have been working on with the team…

Catherine Howe – Head towards the North Star: Some of the shifts we need to make are very much rooted in public service; better coproduction with communities, prevention at scale and deep modernisation of technology and practice. Some of this…

Government IT project disasters are by no means a thing of the past: The PAC’s latest report reveals that NS&I has spent an estimated £111 million on the programme by March 2024, yet it remains unclear how much has been…

New post from Atika on the Luton blog – Full steam ahead! New posts filled, skills assessments, meeting room envy, change agents and champions and AI Club. What a start to 2026!

Tom Loosemore (LinkedIn warning) on how he vibe coded a useful app in no time at all: It really was – and is – that easy. That said, under the bonnet Replit has written a horridly inaccessible, unsupportable, unextendable hairball…

Dave Richardson at Newark and Sherwood District Council – Nine Councils. One Message. A playbook for Multi‑Council Digital Collaboration: When all nine councils across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were tasked with communicating the complexities of local government reorganisation (LGR), it was…

Mike Gallagher – In public : Notes on working in the open: The phrase “make things open: it makes things better” gets tossed around a lot and sounds simple, but I think it encapsulates a profound set of ideas that…