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There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Friday, 27 February, 2026
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Digital LGR Playbook launched!
One of the projects I have been working on for the last 6 months or so is the playbook of support for councils going through reorganisation, which specifically looks at the digital and digital-adjacent things that need dealing with.
It’s really great to see it emerge in the open and for people to start using it to help them plan next steps as they approach reorganisation, which is an almost mind-bindingly complex operation, particularly when splitting counties as well as joining up districts.
We are also collecting people’s details via a signup form to build up our community of people feeding back and providing ideas for what’s next. The playbook has a long way to go to become even remotely comprehensive and more content launches will be happening over the next few months. By joining the community, you can have your say!
Take a look at the playbook and see what you think.
And don’t forget, the team will be represented at the upcoming LGR Camp, so that will be an opportunity to hear about the future of the playbook as well!
This is so good – Richard Pope has shared the detail as well as the slides for a talk on how his Platformland ideas should be applied to the NHS’ 10-year Plan. Loads to apply across the whole spectrum of public services in here.
But in years to come, we’ll look back and realise that the most significant impact of digital for the work of the public sector was not technology it was organisational. That’s because digital practice opens up a new way of working and running organisations. The model of iterative delivery may have first emerged as a way of building software, but it has since proven far more broadly applicable as a way of approaching complex problems.
Also, a brilliant way of properly sharing a talk. Thanks to Richard for taking the time out to do it.
Tuesday, 24 February, 2026
Harry Metcalfe shares a cautionary tale of vibe coding and security:
But the arrival of these tools has – like all development tools that help get more done more easily – raised the security stakes. Tools like Lovable make building and deploying new websites trivial. In this case, one that collects personal data from real people: names, email addresses, postcodes, political opinions. They produce code that works, that looks professional, and that will pass a cursory glance from someone who isn’t a security specialist. But sometimes – often enough that it matters – they are built wide open and the tools don’t go to the trouble of checking, or telling you.
The legendary email client power users wouldn’t let die:
Eudora was, from the very beginning, quirky software built for power users. Like a film director who respects their audience, skipping over exposition and letting them fill in the blanks. It’s not an approach that works for every app or newsletter or whatever else you’re creating. But when it works, people fight to keep your work alive.
Monday, 23 February, 2026
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 20 February 2026
Short week last week as I took a couple of days off for half term. Also, I need to get into the habit of writing these during the week they actually refer to.
This week’s worky highlights:
- Some more Skillstats demos, which were as helpful to me as they were those on the receiving end. Some great challenge around accessibility which I need to look into.
- Am doing some thinking around combined / strategic authorities and their potential role in supporting collaboration and innovation between councils and, eventually, other place based services as well. I think there’s a thing here, and there’s not a huge amount of conversation out in the open about it.
- As part of the above, I got Google’s Notebook LM to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of research for me, which has been a real time saver.
- Well over 50 people signed up for LGR Camp, which is great progress!
Not really work stuff:
- I’ve been nagging people on LinkedIn to try and post the interesting things they put on there on the open web as well. Most people respond graciously, but I don’t want to become annoying about it!
- Ironically, I feel I am in the opposite boat where I publish things here on my blog on the open web but am not sure anybody is reading them! Need to find a way to non-annoyingly repost them on the social spaces, which is weirdly tricky when you don’t use post titles very often. Am encouraging people to sign up to get posts emailed to them, but not many folk are biting on that right now.
Media consumption:
- Watched The Seven Dials on Netflix which was enjoyable but felt weirdly paced. I think either make it a single feature or at least a 6 parter?
- Some classic daft comedies got watched with the kids – Dodgeball, Blades of Glory, etc. More fun for me than the kids I think, who senses of humour appear to be more sophisticated than mine!
- I had a load of half finished books on my Kindle, so I polished those off, which gave me a sene of achievement.
Here’s a photo of one of our cats, Wallis, sitting very properly on the sofa:
Doug Belshaw – I needed a scheduling tool that respects privacy. So I built one:
Scheduler reads iCal feeds, so it works with Proton Calendar or any service supporting iCal/CalDAV standards. It doesn’t store calendar data, instead checking availability in real-time and creating events only when someone books.
People are using AI assistants to code all sorts of useful things. Doug is investigating turning this into a service, which is I think the tricky bit with the code these things are generating.
Emily Webber – A New Communities of Practice Model for Organisational Maturity:
This new model focuses on organisational maturity at five levels from low awareness to self-sustaining and setting standards across six dimensions (structure, culture, collaboration, support, technology and impact). It will be useful for people leading and facilitating cross-organisational communities of practice initiatives.
Thursday, 19 February, 2026
Tom Loosemore published some thoughts about public services and AI on LinkedIn:
Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible. This is both unfair and politically convenient. You could say ‘twas ever thus’. Until now.
From parents seeking special needs support to property owners appealing council tax bands, it’s often the friction of bad service design that restrains demand, not the law.
AI – specifically AI agents – will remove that friction. Your AI agent will be doggedly relentless in how they access public services, however byzantine. They’ll make sure your application is perfectly crafted to maximise your chances of getting what you want, treating any appeals process as just another stage to be navigated by all.
Well worth a read in full.
Update: good news, Tom pointed out to me rhat this post (and indeed a load of his recent writing which I have only seen on LinkedIn) is on a blog on the open web.
Missed this first time around, but there’s some interesting stuff to think about in here – Courage is required for GDS Local to succeed.
There is currently both a real opportunity and a grave danger facing local government in England from the confluence of technological and governance considerations. The opportunity is to use the forthcoming governance changes to review the current fragmentation of approaches and consolidate both operating models and their enabling technology stacks. The danger is that the governance changes will absorb the available leadership bandwidth and will actually significantly delay the digital transformation of the local government sector.
A new Mac desktop RSS aggregator for me to have a look at.
Wednesday, 18 February, 2026
Claire Craig from the Essex Digital Service on User research in libraries: finding the voices between the bookshelves
We’re currently working through a research project, exploring Essex residents’ thoughts and feelings about AI being used in public services. We’ve recruited research participants for online and in-person one-to-one interviews, and the sessions are well underway and proving to be hugely insightful.
And whilst we’re deeply grateful for every single participant who answers the online recruitment call, project after project after project falls short of reaching a demographically representative sample. They are somewhat self-selecting – you’ll reach the highly engaged, the digitally literate, the loud and confident voices (sometimes, the squeakiest wheel). You have to go further to find the complete set of user voices.
New book from Public Digital, might well be worth an order: Shaping technology for transformation.