Daily note for 14 September 2023

These notes have been a bit less daily of late.

I’m chatting to a couple of smaller councils at the moment who are looking to significantly refresh their websites. It struck me that there really ought to a be a go-to playbook on the steps to go through, to avoid utterly pointless wheel reinvention. Of course, there isn’t one, so I am recruiting people to help me put it together. Do please join in!

As an aside, it’s quite interesting using Trello as a means of doing pretty much everything in a collaborative project, including using specific cards as discussion threads, and so on. It’s a remarkably flexible tool, really good at almost everything (except managing projects, ho ho!)

I newslettered yesterday, mostly about the concept of ‘legacy’ in local government tech and what to do about it.

“Focusing on just outcomes leads to whacky tech decisions” – more along the ‘it’s not not about the technology’ lines.

“Lessons for implementing digital health technologies”

I quite like this distinction: “Federation vs Small Pieces Loosely Joined”

Lots of stuff coming out about how Chrome is increasingly unethical as a browser, what with its data collecting and whatnot. Mark, amongst others, is using Firefox, which as a suggestion feels delightfully old school to me. Handily, Mozilla have just published a guide to switching from one to the other.

Daily note for 12 September 2023

“It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy” – somewhat concerning.

Love this, eccentric bringing back to life of ancient, almost useless technology. Beautiful.

Lovely reflections from Tim Davies, someone I don’t speak to much these days but remember very fondly from the wild west early days of social media and whatnot.

Lloyd on networks, connections and location – and why we need Dopplr back.

Lambeth are in the seat for this Local Digital Fund project on building control. Worth keeping an eye on. (Again, though, why oh why Medium?)

James Herbert reflects on recent engagements around data, and what lessons can be drawn. Definitely worthy of a mull.

As Rob on Twitter says, these five points from TechUK about ‘care tech’ feel a bit sticking-plaster-y.

Daily note for 7 September 2023

Chunky update as I haven’t published for a couple of days. Was in the office in Lambeth yesterday.

Whoever designed the file sharing permissions in Microsoft 365 should probably go and find some other purpose in life.

Postmarks looks interesting. Like a single-user but federated del.icio.us style bookmarking site.

Steph and I migrated LocalGov.blog away from the shared hosting it was on to something a bit more robust and scalable (Digital Ocean, via SpinupWP). It was a bit fraught at times as WordPress multisite can be a cranky beast, and there were the usual frustrations waiting for DNS changes to propagate and so on. But we got there!

Remember, if you need a site hosting for something, and it’s vaguely local government related, you can ask for it to be set up on LocalGov.blog. Just drop me a line!

Runnymede – from Magna Carta to simplified public services – interesting stuff, feels like a vendor driven piece – maybe? – but subtle about it.

Improving the SEND local offer – always impressive to see Stockport blogging away about the work they are doing. I don’t think I know anyone there, need to fix that.

I newslettered yesterday – “Continuing a recent theme here, I was at the weekend mulling over the – perfectly correct – narrative that ‘technology isn’t the most important thing’. To my mind, this has unfortunately been interpreted by many as ‘technology doesn’t matter at all’, which has left many organisations in a bit of a pickle.”

What do you mean you don’t want to use Audacity in the browser?

Couple of great videos from Russell Davies on presenting:

https://vimeo.com/712319769

https://vimeo.com/725366546

Daily note for 31 August 2023

I sent out a newsletter this morning.

These daily notes are going well, I think, in that I am keeping up with them and it’s really helpful to keep a record of the good stuff I am coming across. But am definitely just posting links, and not really saying much else. I’ll try and fix that – unless, of course, people like the links, and don’t like my wittering.

Design for audiences or topics and tasks? – good stuff from the team in Bristol and always good to see the blogs I host being active!

Daily note for 30 August 2023

I wrote a post about simple things for leadership types to bear in mind when thinking about technology.

WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).

What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”

5 simple rules for organisational leaders to keep in mind about technology

Commenting on James Herbert’s sensible post about approaching AI in local government, I came up with 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious that all senior people ought to have in their minds whenever technology is being discussed.

  • If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one
  • You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations
  • There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan
  • There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic
  • Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

Increasingly, I tend to speak about digital being different from previous approaches to technology because it includes a healthy dose of cynicism about the ability of technology to improve anything, ever. Perhaps these points reflect that!

Daily note for 29 August 2023

One of the advantages of daily noting in MarsEdit is… tags!

Setting the ambition for Future Councils – been looking forward to seeing some outcomes from this work. Will write up my thoughts once I have had a proper mull.

Text of Bill Thompson’s recent ‘state of the net’ style talk – “The network and its many applications have had a massive impact on our lives, but the tools they gave us were unable to resist the incursions of predatory capitalism or hold back the worst excesses of human toxicity and hatred.”

Roger Swannell describes his way of subscribing to online content – mostly RSS feeds – using Slack. Eccentric, but interesting.

As part of my switch back to Mac on my desktop, I’ve started using NetNewsWire again as my feed reader of choice. It’s old school, it’s free, and it’s open source. What’s not to like? I’ve also abandoned using (and paying for, more importantly!) Feedly to sync up what I have read and not read across devices. I read my feeds on this desktop, or not at all. It’s weirdly liberating! But also, occasionally, real old feeds come back to life for no reason, and a blog not updated since 2011 suddenly downloads 10 articles from 12 years ago. I’ve no idea why this happens.

The end of the Googleverse – “For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question.”

This is insane. I don’t fully understand it, but… blimey:

Improving Bluesky

Bluesky is definitely feeling like the nicest Twitter/X replacement going. But it’s a long way from perfect.

The community feels compact, small but friendly. There’s a sense that people want to be there, and that it isn’t a chore (Mastodon sometimes just feels like hard work). It’s chatty, and whimsical, which is just how early Twitter felt.

It definitely needs more users. Hopefully the invites are dropping regularly enough to keep the flow up.

The main issue for me is that the web interface is really clunky. It’s ludicrously hard to actually clear notifications, so often it looks like there’s something new happening, when there isn’t. I find myself refreshing the browser a lot, which shouldn’t be necessary really.

The app on iOS suffers in the same sort of ways.

There’s also a bit of distraction with Bluesky – all the stuff about servers and things. I guess that important to people who think federation is important, but I suspect those people are limited in number. Most folk just want a usable, stable, Twitter-like experience that isn’t full of horrible behaviour.

Dave Winer would like to see Markdown style editing. Am not totally convinced of that, as I like the plain text approach, and I guess you can still use markup, only the reader has to use their imagination 😆

One thing it lacks, which actually I don’t care about too much, is private direct messages. Twitter/X has those, of course. Sometimes they are useful to drop someone a note to say you’d like to talk to them about something. Maybe though, it would be better to just let people feature their email addresses or other ways to contact them on their profiles. After all, nobody needs yet another place to check for these things.

What they definitely shouldn’t do is copy the way Mastodon does private messaging, which is a proper dog’s dinner. ‘Private mentions’ are almost indistinguishable from public ones, and it terrifies me!

Weekly note for 25 August 2023

One note for the whole week as I haven’t been working. Instead, had a week at home having fun with the family. However, I did occasionally look at a computer, hence the below.

So Twitter/X finally took Tweetdeck away from me, which has made the site a bit less useful. However, I still get way more use from it than any other social site, with the possible exception of LinkedIn, which for people like me is the real winner from the Twitter/X meltdown, I think. Bluesky seems to be picking up members, but it is still very quiet. Mastodon remains Mastodon.

Am back on a Mac now, as my daily driver, and it’s lovely. More on that in a proper post. But one change as a result is that I am now writing these notes in the venerable MarsEdit, which is a great improvement on Simplenote and means I can hit a button to publish them, and not have to faff around copying and pasting.

Fab work by Tewkesbury Council, going live with their new – WordPress powered – website.

“Catching up on the weird world of LLMs“. Great resource from Simon Willison.

Alan Wright’s blog is chock full of brilliantly useful articles, like this one on splitting product teams.

“How the iMac saved Apple“

Daily note for 17 August 2023

Two days in a row out of the house! First time that has happened in a while. Today, I am knackered.

“Digital proof: where one service ends, another begins” https://www.dxw.com/2023/08/digital-proof/

“Team memory, organisational sharing and serendipity in distributed workplaces” https://emilywebber.co.uk/team-memory-organisational-sharing-and-serendipity-in-distributed-workplaces/

Been watching a lot of films at home recently. Finally saw Dunkirk last weekend, and thought it was ok. Seemed very disjointed to me. Then over a few weeknight sittings, got to the end of Heart of Stone, on Netflix. Gal Gadot as Tom Cruise in a Mission:Impossible type thing. Entertaining enough, but hard to care for any of the characters that were still alive at the end.

This looks a great online event about data stuff: https://lu.ma/roots-of-data-for-ngos