DIgitalGov.news is now Sigh. All the old URLs should 301 to the new ones, including the mega RSS feed.

I have received a – to my eyes – absurd cease and desist request (with accompanying threat of “formal action”) from the owners of gov.news because they are worried my single vibe coded page of php digitalgov.news “creates a likelihood…

I have made a few updates to DigitalGovNews: Added Cumberland Council’s digital team blog, and Matt Wood-Hill’s blog to the list. Made the filter choices persistent between sessions Generated a new “master” RSS feed including all the posts aggregated on…

My battle with GoDaddy customer support continues over my borked locali.se domain. In the meantime, dave@sensibletech.co.uk will still reach me 😩

A digital standard for local government

The service standard has had a difficult time getting traction in local government, as a report from the LGA made clear – and this despite councils theoretically committing to it when they signed the digital declaration. But when Atika asked…

Have added a ‘Hire me’ page to the blog, to remind people (and occasionally myself) what I do for a living! It’s at

Made an update to DIgitalGovNews – adding a filter to the top so users can decide which feeds should appear on the page. Check it out: Mostly added because my blog dominates it somewhat and people might want to…

DigitalGov.news is now GovFeed.digital! Today, I made DigitalGovNews GovFeed.digital – an aggregated stream of updates from sites mostly publishing about digital in government. It’s very simple – just a single page of PHP and a stylesheet. It sucks in the…

Am having some problems with the registration of my locali.se domain – which means the website isn’t working (no big deal really) but more annoyingly, emails to my @locali.se email address aren’t coming through. If you want to email me,…

Following my online identity crisis, I’ve given the Localise website a rethink, and now it’s a much simpler one page affair that tells you what I do and how I do it. Now I can focus on all the content…

Being rigorous about decision making is an important part of any kind of digital work, but during LGR it’s vital. I shared this quick and dirty decision making framework with a client today who just needed something to ensure nothing…

Who am I, anyway?

Am having another one of my mini (online-) identity crises. To be clear – this is not a real crisis and almost certainly doesn’t matter at all, so please don’t be concerned for me. I would though value any thoughts…

Another great hire at Luton – welcome to James Bovington, joining as principal developer in the newly formed digital team. James is one of the most ingenious and thoughtful devs I’ve come across, so it’s fabulous having him on the…

On the benefits of a bit of external scrutiny

I have had the pleasure over the last couple of years of being a member of Woking Council’s Digital Design Authority. This is a group made up of a few senior members of the digital team at the Council, the…

As an experiment, relating to some work I’m doing for a customer, I asked Google’s Gemini to do some deep research and write a report about the market for revenues and benefits systems for UK local government. You can read…

Digital LGR Playbook launched!

One of the projects I have been working on for the last 6 months or so is the playbook of support for councils going through reorganisation, which specifically looks at the digital and digital-adjacent things that need dealing with. It’s…