Dave Briggs

My piece about single customer accounts seems to have gone down quite well in most parts. My focus in the last year has mostly been on people and capability stuff, and before that on some of the trickier IT problems facing councils. It’s great that my current work in Lambeth is giving me the chance to revisit the ‘digital experience’ and challenge my thinking a bit: https://sensibletech.co.uk/should-you-develop-a-single-customer-account/

There’s lots of very good stuff in here from Coté: “Waiting for the close of open – how long can the 2000s spirit of open source and open APIs last?” https://cote.io/2023/07/21/waiting-for-the.html

“How Signal Walks the Line Between Anarchism and Pragmatism” https://www.wired.com/story/signal-politics-software-criticism/

“Delivery Needs a Strategy” https://jdosreme.medium.com/delivery-needs-a-strategy-94ef09954f36 (also why oh why do people still publish on Medium?)

Elon Musk has already had a company called X. It merged with PayPay in 2000, and then within months the PayPal people got sick of what a terrible guy he was to work with, and sidelined him. I dare say rebranding Twitter is the first step in what Musk hopes will be his great ‘I told you I was right’ project. He’s re-opening a 23 year old wound. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66284304

“Inside 4chan’s Top-Secret Moderation Machine” https://www.wired.com/story/4chan-moderation-buffalo-shooting/ (I wanted to read this so much I actually subscribed to Wired’s online edition for the privilege!)

I wrote about why I don’t think single user accounts are a good thing for local councils: https://sensibletech.co.uk/should-you-develop-a-single-customer-account/ – also sent as a newsletter https://www.davebriggs.email/p/daveslist-volume-3-issue-5

Matt ‘Jukesie’ Jukes is looking for work. You should hire him! https://digitalbydefault.com/2023/07/20/whats-next/

I keep seeing this image popping up in various online places, and it sums up exactly where a lot of local gov is when it comes to Ai, machine learning etc:

“Better government tech starts with people. New Jersey shows how” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/13/new-jersey-digital-unemployment-insurance/

Love this quote from the above article: “smart digital investments must start with people”.

“This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time.” https://mastodon.social/@cote@social.lol/110751957148905976

Delighted to see another local gov blog launching today! https://warwickdc.localgov.blog/

Some lovely stuff in here: https://waxy.org/2023/07/vote-on-the-tiny-awards/

Maddening but brilliant, like a reverse Tetris: https://vividfax.itch.io/fudge

Another newsletter went out today: https://www.davebriggs.email/p/daveslist-volume-3-issue-4

“Teaching agility, not Agile™” https://medium.com/@rchatley/teaching-agility-not-agile-a69ed6644682

Ooooooh: “Open Working 101” https://medium.com/we-are-cast/open-working-101-f8fa10385061

Daughter was telling me this morning about dog and cat based ASMR videos, and I said I really don’t think that was what TBL had in mind when he invented the web and she said dad, you’re so old.

Ben Unsworth, talking about digital transformation in local government. What’s not to like? https://open.spotify.com/episode/5dwqlqSqoRlZ1zJiB8xr9t

Stockport Council asks “How can we use data to help support people to leave hospital when safe and appropriate to do so?” https://www.digitalstockport.info/how-can-we-use-data-to-help-support-people-to-leave-hospital-when-safe-and-appropriate-to-do-so/

The Digital Inclusion Toolkit is looking for sponsors. If you can, you should: https://digitalinclusionkit.org/digital-inclusion-news/sponsor-the-digital-inclusion-toolkit/

Am stepping things up a bit with localgov.blog. Have coerced Steph Gray into helping me migrate and upgrade the whole thing, and set up a Basecamp site (still my favourite online collaboration thingy) to get all the users in one conversation to help me understand better what they need.

My Bluesky experience so far has been mostly terrible. I really don’t like the website interface – it feels like something I might have put together myself. Notifications fail to clear, and the same posts are always just there for some reason. I don’t follow enough people, is no doubt part of the problem.

It was our son’s graduation yesterday. So proud! But also, how did that happen? I’m so old!

On Saturday we watched the new Indiana Jones film. Very silly of course but it did capture some of the fun of the originals, which I was just mad keen on when I was a kid.

I used ChatGPT to build myself a simple flat file homepage to point to the various places I exist online. It’s remarkably easy to just feed it a few prompts and then tweak as necessary. Am sure I will keep fiddling, but it’s a start, and was so easy! https://www.davebriggs.xyz/

I really agree with Terence Eden on this https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/discord-is-not-documentation/ – and not just because I personally find Discord impossible to navigate!

I think this is true of a lot of online communities too – there’s that concept which was spoken about a lot 15 years ago (remember Wikipatterns? https://stewartmader.com/wikipatterns/ ), but now not so often, of online community ‘gardeners’ – people who’d tidy conversations up, retrieve and keep the good stuff where everyone could find it, and not allow knowledge to be lost or forgotten.

Viola the Bird is quite a strange thing https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/nAEJVwNkp-FnrQ