“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
On reflection, my honest view is that, 5 years in, councils that have signed the declaration really ought to be doing an awful lot more of the things they signed up to do. The declaration’s content is fine. It just needs to be acted on.
This is one of those articles that goes after a sacred cow or two, and is pretty excorciating in places. I don’t agree with much of it, but it sure is a useful challenge: “Beware the Digital Whiteboard” https://www.wired.com/story/beware-the-digital-whiteboard/
(This is a repost of something I posted elsewhere but hadn’t backed up on this blog before. I have backdated the post to the original date, but it’ll probably pop up in places automatically. It’s evergreen content though, so it’s all good 😊)
I dare say that if you were to stand in a town centre and ask passers-by whether they would find it useful to have everything they interact with their local council about in one online place, there’s a good chance most people would say yes. It kind of sounds sensible, a difficult thing to argue against.
However, in practice, would they use it? Would it make their lives any easier? Would it lead to better outcomes for them? I would argue probably not.
But there’s another problem with single online accounts, and that is the fact they are non-existent. I’ve never heard of one that actually has every service a council offers online operating inside it. Instead, all single accounts cover all the services, except for all the ones they don’t.
This is for perfectly understandable reasons, but the lack of openness about the fact is really problematic. If you market your account as being the single account, but then have to tell users that actually it isn’t, and they need to use something different to look at their planning application or complete the social care financial assessment, it makes a mockery of the whole thing and it confuses the hell out of everyone.
The sheer amount of time, effort and money that would have to be spent to create a genuine single account would make it the ROI calculation result so negative you’d have to make the cell in your business case spreadsheet really wide just to display it.
The other thing to consider is that the actual user need here doesn’t really exist. How many services are there where seeing them together is useful?
I’d argue that most people never interact with their council. When most do, it’s a case of a single objective, where the user wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. There are some people who have complex needs who regularly interact with multiple council services – but for these people, you’re never going to online transact your way through their issues. It will invariably need a much more human relationship than can be offered by a digital account.
It’s the same with single customer records, or golden records. Is it a good thing? I’m not convinced myself, but luckily I don’t have to be because it’s an impossible thing to actually achieve. The data gets messy, duplicates get created, data doesn’t pass between systems very well, some services just don’t use systems that touch anything else, others use systems you aren’t even aware of.
To summarise – I’m pretty sure that the user need for single accounts doesn’t exist and that implementing them will make most user journeys harder than they need to be. What I am definitely sure about is that they are practically impossible to implement, and leaving the inevitable halfway-house in place is just going to confuse and infuriate your users even more.
So what should you do?
Spend the time and money you would have spent on aggregating a bunch of services into a single digital space on designing really good digital services, using the right service patterns and technology capabilities for that service – rather than trying to jam everything into the same model of delivery
Put effort into creating consistent online experiences for your users – whether they are accessing a service you have built yourself, or interacting with something one of your line of business system suppliers has put together for you. Have a design system which articulates the look and feel of online user journeys and sets out common patterns in terms of what information is asked for when, and so on. If your supplier can’t meet these needs, consider building a front end for them – but that doesn’t mean integrating that service with a bunch of other, unrelated ones
Consider the actually helpful element of a single account and apply those to your digital services. It might well be that having one way to authenticate yourself is a good thing, so nobody needs multiple passwords. But even with this – don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap where because you can authenticate people, you always should. If you don’t need a username and a password to complete a service, don’t force people to use them
There are clear advantages to being able to bring data about people and households together in an ethical way to better understand their circumstances, predict potential future issues and to work out what the most impactful interventions might be. However, this is a council problem, not a user problem, and so the hard work should not be outsourced to the user by making them jump through hoops to get the help they need. Instead, get the data you need out of wherever it exists and use data tools to bring it together, transform it, and make decisions based on it
So that’s my view. Single accounts are almost impossible to achieve and are of dubious benefit. I shall return to this topic in 2030.
A decision I made when I took my current gig at Lambeth was just to do 4 days a week, so I had a day a week to pootle about doing other things. The first of those days is today and ngl it feels a bit odd!
I was around when this idea was first being mooted, and it’s brill to see it live. It’s a genuine digital age capability that can be slotted into many a service, making life easier for service users as well as making the back office a bit more efficient. What’s not to like? https://www.madetech.com/blog/evidence-saas-product/
For a few years now, I have been advising councils not to seek savings through digital work, but to use digital to make the savings they were demanding from their services anyway tolerable for their service users and staff.
This means being more creative about how to fund digital work, beyond simple invest to save capital spend.
This is a lovely piece by Giles Turnbull and I will be first in the queue for the book when it emerges! https://howteamsremember.com/
“I created Clippy”:
I’ve signed up for and downloaded Threads. I don’t like the lack of a web interface, if I’m honest and it makes a mockery of my no-social-media phone policy. Hopefully one will come soon. It’s also full of a lot of “suggested content” that I’ve not chosen to see and there’s no apparent way to turn that off. Which is a turn off.
I wonder if there’s a tweak to Betteridge’s law of headlines that states that when the headline ending in a question mark is related to AI, the NO answering it is even more emphatic than normal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
New newsletter out today, which I have switched to Substack. It does feel like building personal networks through things like email might be the answer to the breakdown of more public social media like Twitter etc https://daveslist.substack.com/p/daves-list-vol-3-issue-1
I can’t believe the above doesn’t include Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy or What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff!
Haringey Council have launched a new blog on my localgov.blog service, chatting about their website redevelopment project. Do check it out, and if your council wants a free blog, you know where to find me. https://haringey.localgov.blog/
I do need to have a think about localgov.blog and what I ought to do with it. Right now it’s fine and it ticks along quite nicely, but there are improvements that in an ideal world I would like to make. Currently though, am not sure the effort would really be justified!
I still haven’t reinstalled any social media apps on my phone, and I am still ok with it. Am I spending less time on my phone as a result? Maybe, but think I’m browsing the open web a bit more than I was.
THIS from Dave Winer: “I wonder if now what I’ve been trying to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting, get underneath the bigco’s and live on a plane that doesn’t require any one of them, makes a bit more sense now.” It sure does http://scripting.com/2023/07/03.html#a143645
More fedi-fun: run your own YouTube clone with PeerTube. Sounds like a good way to bankrupt yourself if you aren’t careful – https://joinpeertube.org/
The latest ridiculous behaviour from Twitter seems to genuinely be sending the site into a death spiral, which saddens me in a lot of ways. I’ve been on there since the early days, and I’ve built a reasonably sized following on there as a result. I don’t really have anywhere else where I can easily put things that a sizable chunk of the people I’d like to see them would actually have a chance of doing so. But it’s more than that: Twitter was never just a channel, it was also a place I made actual friends, folk who I speak to regularly. Loose communities formed, dispersed, and reformed as and when they were needed. Looking back, those who were saying that Twitter wasn’t really a company, it was a bit of internet infrastructure, were probably right, but nobody listened.
So now there are hundreds of alternatives sprouting up, including the Instagram based Threads which is due to be released on Thursday. Bluesky seems popular, Mastodon is doing well within its slightly dorky niche. But what they all lack is the moment. It’s 2023, not 2007 when all this seemed so new and exciting; it’s not 2010 when the whole world seemed to wake up to what was possible on sites like Twitter. Without that excited, exploratory, experimental surge, I’m gloomy about the prospects of any of these places filling the gap that Twitter did, uniquely. Imperfectly, but uniquely.
If someone, somehow, managed to lift my whole Twitter network and shift it into a different thing, I would jump there like a shot. In the meantime, I think I will keep dabbling, but also spending time on more personal, and less ephemeral, spaces like this blog – and maybe make use of the newsletter more.
First day in my new job over. Am enjoying the feeling of getting to know my new surroundings, and using that new job motivation to start various balls rolling.
I do really enjoy podcasts, and I love that it’s remained an open system. But in terms of them paying for themselves, it worries me slightly that all the ads on podcasts are for other podcasts, which doesn’t seem awfully sustainable.
Quick job update from me: after a fantastic year doing digital culture and capability stuff at Brum, it’s time for me to move on. Next up, I will be supporting Amanda Stevens at Lambeth with digital in social care, as well as helping figure out digital platform stuff more generally. Looking forward to getting cracking tomorrow!
Birmingham is a fabulous place to do digital and technology work, brilliantly led by Cheryl Doran and I will be watching them do more and more amazing things over the next few years. Thanks to all the team there for making my time so fulfilling! ❤️
Our daughter Jade has launched a podcast with her friend at work. We are super proud of her, and you should definitely check it out and subscribe if you’re interested in what’s up with social media these days https://shows.acast.com/the-social-sisters-podcast
I think she’s more interested in people watching the YouTube stream than the audio, which just shows how younger people think differently about podcasts than grey beards like me https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-jPaF2wC1FExsh3Tjk1zIQ
I wrote a lengthy response to someone asking about decision making and governance in local government IT and digital. At some point I will write it up properly as a blog post, but in the meantime, here’s a copy and paste of it: https://app.simplenote.com/publish/zsmqVq
Am clearly loving Simplenote’s publishing feature. I’ve been looking at Notion again, but it does feel a bit over-features for my needs.
I sent out an email newsletter yesterday, just containing some of the links I have been sharing in these notes recently. I’m nopt altogether happy using TinyLetter for it, but not sure I can really justify spending real money on using something like Mailchimp (which I would have to do given the subsriber numbers). If you don’t get it, and want to, you can here: https://sensibletech.co.uk/newsletter/
Relistening to the audiobook of Dan Lyons’ Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble and while it’s flawed and clearly problematic in places, it’s also pretty funny and a great takedown of the sheer brazen hypocrisy of VC backed startup land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_the_Start_Up_Bubble
I think in all honestly on the Fediverse platying nicely with Meta / Facebook / Threads / whatever, my view is either you’re open or your not and if you are, you have to accept some of the risks as well as the opportunities. I dare say that if some of the more esoteric Mastodon servers operating decided to block Threads, very few people would know or care. If some of the bigger ones, like mastodon.social, were to do so, that might be more of an issue.
I’m trying a tweak to the way I write these notes, in that I have switched from using Obsidian to Simplenote. Main reason for this is that Simplenote has apps across Windows, MacOS and iOS and syncs across them all – https://simplenote.com
I don’t often want to add stuff I see on my phone, but it happens just enough to make it annoying that my previous workflow didn’t allow for it.
It lacks the ability to post direct to WordPress but I think I can get it to work via my phone by sharing the note in question with the iOS WordPress app. Will let you know how that goes.
It’s owned – I think? – by Automattic (effectively the corporate overseers of WordPress) so am a bit surprised there isn’t more obvious integration. It is possible to publish a note though, like this: https://app.simplenote.com/p/gvHGj3
Simplenote is free but has an option to pay about £200 a year for no extra features whatsoever, which is an intriguing value proposition.
"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves."
― James Joyce, Ulysses
Am enjoying Spellcaster, a podcast about crypto-bozo Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX disaster zone https://wondery.com/shows/spellcaster/ (I don’t necessarily understand it all but I feel better for having read it)
I’m really enjoying an Apple Music playlist, Living the Library – fairly quiet, mostly instrumental ‘electronic’ music. Good to work to.
Interesting point made by Brandon on Software Defined Talk, that I hadn’t really thought about before. The advantage of distributed networks like Mastodon for organisations is the ability to host a server and control who has accounts on that server. So rather than (say) BBC employees going through a verification process to prove who they are, like on Twitter in days gone by, instead they just have an account on the official BBC Mastodon. Bit like having a bbc.co.uk email address. Makes sense. https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/414
