Tuesday, 17 March, 2026

New resource added to the digital LGR playbook by the team – Cyber readiness.

Ensuring a new unitary council can protect data, detect threats, maintain secure access, and keep critical services running from day one.

#

Monday, 16 March, 2026

Terence Eden – How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?:

When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced.

#

I don’t entirely understand this, but it sure is interesting:

With my.WordPress.net, WordPress runs entirely and persistently in your browser. There’s no sign-up, no hosting plan, and no domain decision standing between you and getting started. Built on WordPress Playground, my.WordPress.net takes the same technology that powers instant WordPress demos and turns it into something permanent and personal. This isn’t a temporary environment meant to be discarded. It’s a WordPress that stays with you.

#

Friday, 13 March, 2026

Good news – New pilot to help councils identify and support residents at risk to vulnerability earlier:

Local Digital is pleased to share that the Scalable Approach to Vulnerability via Interoperability (SAVVI) and Open Referral UK (ORUK) data standards are taking an important step forward.

The government is investing £1.1 million to test the adoption of these 2 leading data standards in real service environments. The findings will help shape future scaling across England.

Pilots with Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council will help both areas identify and support vulnerable people earlier, more effectively and more consistently.

These pilots mark a major step toward a future where councils can work proactively, not reactively, using data to identify early signs of people at risk to vulnerability and connect them to the right support before issues become more serious.

#

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.

#

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.

#

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).

#

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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

This is neat:

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

#

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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

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

#