Thursday, 12 March, 2026

Steph Tucker – An observation: many government content style guides exist, but they’re rarely used in practice (LinkedIn warning):

A much better approach is to make content patterns and standards an active team practice. You can do this by running regular sessions where you look at real pages and talk about links, words you use, buttons, components – the small stuff.

Consistency is what creates a good user experience. When patterns and language are predictable, users learn how a service works and move through it with confidence.

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Wednesday, 11 March, 2026

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 team here.

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Tuesday, 10 March, 2026

Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, has released a new RSS reader, Inkwell. It has some interesting features:

Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts yesterday or the day before. And Fading is for posts up to a week old. After a week, posts fade out of Inkwell, so you’ll never be overwhelmed with unread posts. If you missed them, it’s okay.

Pretty sure that if I was starting blogging today, I would use micro.blog. Seems such a neat platform – and would work well with my style of blogging (which with WordPress feels sometimes a bit of a stretch).

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Monday, 9 March, 2026

Adrian Imms at the University of Sussex with a whole host of helpful thoughts following their experience significantly reducing the number of editors of the corporate website:

In early February, we finally managed to centralise the editing of our public website into one University Digital Team of 20 people. And then last week we were able to reskin the existing website into a new brand. More on the latter in another post.

Anyone who works in digital services for a university will know that centralising, formalising or professionalising the editing of a website is an arduous process. For many peers I know in leadership roles, it’s basically a pipe dream.

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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 relevant portfolio holding member, as well and myself and a few other independent folk with experience of this kind of thing in local government.

It was set up by Adam Walther, and carried on by Anita Flavell after Adam’s departure for Lambeth, to provide a bit of critical friendship to the Council as it sought to improve various elements of digital service provision – from the website to telephones, from its use of data to the opportunities of AI and automation – at the fraction of the cost of contracting with a ‘transformation partner’ or similar.

We simply meet up every month, and have a chat about progress, and discussion upcoming decisions, asking the odd difficult question but also sharing experiences and what has worked well (and not so well) for us all previously.

It provides the Council with a bit of assurance that it is doing the right things, in the right way. It also provides the lead member with confidence that officers are doing everything they can to ensure the best use of funds to deliver on the promised outcomes.

It seems such an obvious thing to do, I wonder why more councils don’t also do it!

#On the benefits of a bit of external scrutiny

Friday, 6 March, 2026

Thursday, 5 March, 2026

Simon Millier from Adur & Worthing Councils reports on progress with open digital planning (Medium warning):

It’s been a busy and productive period for our multi-disciplinary team. As usual we’re balancing the Open Digital Planning project alongside day-to-day business as usual work, and the team has done a commendable job attempting to find time to ensure they remain on top of our work objectives.

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Wednesday, 4 March, 2026

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 and comment on what it produced on Google Docs, if you want to. It’s certainly a comprehensive document, although it’s very hard for me to decide what in there is correct or way off beam.

Is this helpful – especially for those councils approaching LGR? I have no idea.

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This is neat:

Gazette is a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers.

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Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure:

A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to treat these systems as shared infrastructure. This siloed approach fragments systems, making it harder to share or leverage data among public agencies and with the private sector.

What if we treated a set of core digital systems—such as digital IDs, payments, data exchange platforms, credentials, and other shared services that drive core functions across government and the economy—the same way we treat roads or power grids? As essential, long-term, shared systems designed for repeated use.

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Monday, 2 March, 2026

The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns.

It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in a service design – also linking them to technical capabilities at the right level of abstraction.

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Friday, 27 February, 2026

There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.

CleanShot 2026-02-27 at 15.34.29@2x.

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Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running:

AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your competitors are already using’, and of course embedded in platforms on which we all depend.

That shift from you can use this to you can’t afford not to happened quickly and without anyone holding a vote.

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Multiplayer snake in a terminal window, you say? Why not.

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Thursday, 26 February, 2026

Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms:

Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that ask for the same personal information, and waiting days or even weeks while an overstretched public employee cross-references and shares data across various systems before reaching a decision about our eligibility…

…But what if we could invert this model? What if we could implement a genuinely citizen-centred approach to service design, one built around the principle of instant proof of eligibility and not centralised and repetitive data collection and processing?

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Ben Carpenter shares some recent updates to the service standard (LinkedIn warning):

We’ve made it extra clear in ‘Solve a whole problem for users’ and ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ that existing principles to design around users and not technology, and to reuse existing solutions, apply to AI technologies as they do to traditional digital technologies. This is the case throughout the Service Standard, but we have called it out specifically in those points.

There are also new requirements in ‘Have a multidisciplinary team’ for service teams using AI in a service to have someone on or available to the team who fully understands how it works and the impact of using it.

And ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ now requires teams to assess the impact of technologies on user experience, inclusion, and the reliability of information and decisions.

We have also specified that quality assurance testing must not be left to automated tools and that service teams must monitor outcomes for users and ethical issues such as bias.

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Interesting writing project from Ben Welby – The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World:

Public service teams are at a kairos moment: a time when a new technical capability invites us to rethink almost everything about how we build and deliver services. But our centre of gravity isn’t swayed by “AI magic”. It rests on civic values we already know to be true: start from user needs; follow evidence over hunches; prize outcomes over outputs; prefer pragmatism to hype; fix the basics; and above all, put human worth and inclusion at the core. These are the ground we stand on when anything new arrives.

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Wednesday, 25 February, 2026

I’ve added auto-posting from this blog onto LinkedIn and Bluesky, using IFTTT to automate taking the RSS feed and turning it into posts on those networks.

I ran into an issue with the full posts being too long for Bluesky, so they didn’t get posted (LinkedIn has a more generous limitation I think).

Now, the simple thing would be to just tell WordPress via the settings to publish excerpts of posts via RSS rather than the full text – but I don’t want to! I like making it as easy as possible for folk to read this stuff. Or just send the post titles and a link to the socials – but I mostly don’t use post titles!

So, I called up Gemini and talked it through generating a small piece of code to generate an additional RSS feed just for social posting, that truncates at the 200 character mark (Bluesky’s limit is 300 but I am not sure if I need to leave space for links and things).

The feed seems to work, and this post will hopefully test to see if it works.

If anyone would like to see the code, just yell.

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