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New book from Public Digital, might well be worth an order: Shaping technology for transformation.
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Wednesday, 18 February, 2026
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Tuesday, 17 February, 2026
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 13 February 2026
Another Tuesday posting! Weeks are flying by. I guess this is part of getting older. That and getting increasingly bad at remembering, well, anything.
This week’s worky highlights:
- The publication of the LGR DDaT playbook has been postponed for a couple of weeks. It’s a shame but can’t be helped. In the meantime we are writing the next sections, organising new community activities, and all that stuff.
- Am also getting a bit more involved in another strand of work with Local Digital, around future tech strategies for councils. How do we create the conditions to make it easier for councils to invest in better tech? Various ideas are being worked on – including some things I’ve wanted to see happen for years!
- More interviews at Luton, this time for a senior role leading on IG. Once again, great candidates and a terrific hire made.
- Delivered a couple more demos of Skillstats, and enquiries are still coming in as well, which is lovely. Getting close to those who have purchased going live too, which is exciting.
Not really work stuff:
- I added email subscriptions to the blog. I haven’t managed to get a newsletter out this year, so I guess this is a way to make myself feel better about that.
- Properly had a play with the default Apple Notes app on the phone and desktop. Trying to use it to organise myself a bit – it does a lot more than I thought it did. Have set up a note to act as a todo list, organised into now, next, and later to try and keep everything in one place. I give it a week before it all falls apart!
Media consumption:
- I finally finished Until I Find You and it was really quite good. A high 4/5 from me.
- Watched the end of The Rip on Netflix, which was also good – recommended for those who like twisty thrillers.
- Saw the finale of The Traitors’ most recent season. There was a palpable moment where I thought “They’re actually going to do it!”. Great fun.
- I find modern computer games just too damn complicated for my simple brain, so imagine how delighted I was to get Micropolis working on my Mac. It’s basically the original 1989 version of Sim City. Great for whiling away the odd hour – and not too much more.
Monday, 16 February, 2026
Carol from the team at Luton blogs about the new telephony system implementation:
When we kicked this off, it wasn’t just because our old Avaya system was outdated; it was because colleagues were struggling with tools that didn’t support how we work today.
We needed something more reliable, more flexible, and far easier for staff and residents to engage with.
Love that new voices are being heard, about a whole range of different types of work. Blogging isn’t just for the web team!
The LGA have released their toolkit for local government reorganisation (LGR). There’s not much digital in it – largely because that will be covered in detail in MHCLG’s DDaT LGR playbook, which I have been working on with the team for the last few months.
More blog tweaking. I’ve added an email subscription option so readers can get news posts from here in their inboxes automagically. Just use the sign up box in the header of the site on desktop, or on mobile the same form is on the contact page.
It uses the Jetpack plugin, which I have always been nervous of – because of bloat – but having played with a few options, it really is the easiest to set up and maintain. I’ve turned off as many of the other features as I can, so hopefully performance isn’t affected too much.
(There’s also a thing for me about Jetpack which makes it slightly contradictory to self-hosting my blog. Jetpack ties you in to the WordPress.com platform – so it makes me wonder what the point is of not hosting there in the first place!)
One thing is that it defaults to sending post individually, which might get annoying. On your first email on subscribing you get a button to press to manage delivery – I suggest you switch to daily! Sadly I can’t amend the default.
Friday, 13 February, 2026
Catherine Howe – Head towards the North Star:
Some of the shifts we need to make are very much rooted in public service; better coproduction with communities, prevention at scale and deep modernisation of technology and practice. Some of this I wrote about in my last post. Other shifts are more in response to bigger change and what a modern workforce needs to thrive; how we become more inclusive internally and externally, how we provide an environment where learning is embedded in how we work as a way to underpin a more adaptive organisation, how we make hybrid working genuinely work for people.
If only every chief exec was so thoughtful, and open!
Government IT project disasters are by no means a thing of the past:
The PAC’s latest report reveals that NS&I has spent an estimated £111 million on the programme by March 2024, yet it remains unclear how much has been spent in total or what the final cost will be. Despite five years of development, NS&I still has no agreed integrated plan, and a draft produced in late 2025 suggested the programme would not be completed before March 2028, later than originally planned. The PAC has expressed concern that NS&I’s attempts to compress the timeline further may not be realistic.
Tuesday, 10 February, 2026
A small piece of blog housekeeping: I just went to search for something I wrote years ago on here and realised in my last redesign I didn’t add an easy to find search function.
So, I bunged the default theme search modal thingy into the header for desktop users, which served my purposes. But sadly mobile users wouldn’t see this, as they can a hamburger style menu with only page links in it.
To fix this, I created a page with a search box on it, and linked to it from the mobile-only burger menu.
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 6 February 2026
A Tuesday posting but I don’t suppose anybody minds – most of this was written last week though, promise.
This week’s worky highlights:
- The LGR DDaT playbook is on the cusp of release, which is very exciting. It’ll be nice to be involved in getting a project out of the door for the Local Digital folk, and hopefully one we can keep iterating and improving on for some time.
- Good day in the office for Luton, interviewing candidates for a Head of Service role. Lots of great conversations and met some lovely people with so many ideas. We could have hired almost everyone, which was a really nice feeling but gave us a difficult choice to make!
- Also in Luton news, I handed over the reigns of managing the blog to Nova in the web team, who seems reasonably pleased about it. Am also hoping to use the blog as a means of “trying out” some product approaches within the team in a relatively low risk environment.
- Skillstats keeps progressing, with two more organisations starting the process to come on board and one new demo done.
Not really work stuff:
- Some lovely catchups during the week, including Lisa Trickey, Anita Flavell, Clare Evans, Joe Cole, Ben Cheetham – and probably others (sorry I have forgotten you).
- I started the process of organising the design and print of one of those pop up banners you see at conferences, for Skillstats. This is some way out of my comfort zone.
- I find myself getting a bit annoyed with all the noise there is at the moment about digital in local government. I think a lot of it is unhelpful! Once more I feel the urge to write down somewhere What I Think About This Sort of Thing.
Media consumption:
- Really enjoying Until I Find You but boy, is it long.
- Started the latest series of The Apprentice and the first episode reached such levels of cringe that my stomach was in knots for hours afterwards.
- Board games: played 7 Wonders – a christmas present from Mrs Briggs – for the first time and enjoyed it hugely. Also Splendour: Duel which is way more mentally taxing that the 3+ player version!
We also took a family day out for a tramp round the grounds of Oxburgh Hall, which was very nice for blowing away some cobwebs, and quality family time.
New post from Atika on the Luton blog – Full steam ahead!
New posts filled, skills assessments, meeting room envy, change agents and champions and AI Club. What a start to 2026!
Monday, 9 February, 2026
Can’t stop listening to Sigur Rós’ Starálfur – such an ethereally beautiful song.
Wednesday, 4 February, 2026
Tom Loosemore (LinkedIn warning) on how he vibe coded a useful app in no time at all:
It really was – and is – that easy. That said, under the bonnet Replit has written a horridly inaccessible, unsupportable, unextendable hairball of JavaScript. It’s more of a toy than a product.
Monday, 2 February, 2026
Dave Richardson at Newark and Sherwood District Council – Nine Councils. One Message. A playbook for Multi‑Council Digital Collaboration:
When all nine councils across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were tasked with communicating the complexities of local government reorganisation (LGR), it was clear that traditional, council‑by‑council messaging wouldn’t be enough. Residents needed clarity. Communications teams needed speed. And every authority needed a neutral, trusted space to share information.
Mike Gallagher – In public : Notes on working in the open:
The phrase “make things open: it makes things better” gets tossed around a lot and sounds simple, but I think it encapsulates a profound set of ideas that define what is specific to working in the public sector. We need to continue to sing this song so that future generations know what we mean and why we mean it.
Friday, 30 January, 2026
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 30 January 2026
January has felt like a looooong month, and I haven’t really enjoyed it. Doesn’t feel like I am remotely up to speed after the festive break, still! So tired. So very tired.
This week’s worky highlights:
- Getting some of the info-gov stuff sorted for clients using Skillstats – DPIAs and that sort of thing. Slightly dull but really important.
- We are ever closer to the launch of the LGR DDaT Playbook, so that is fun. Looking forward to finding out what people make of it, and what they think we ought to work on next.
- Plenty of signups happening for LGRCamp, which is nice to see.
- Had a lovely meetup of the LocaliseLive! crowd. Heard some great stories of how different councils are making use of technology in a quiet, efficient but innovative way.
- Nice chat with Neilly and his colleagues at the BFI to see if they could use Skillstats to help them baseline their various digital capability building efforts.
Not really work stuff:
- Managed to go a week with just posting on this blog and not tweaking anything on it, which is, I think, a result.
- Chatted with some learning and development folk reminded me of the really good bit of Learning Pool when I worked there some 15 years ago: the catalogue of shared e-learning that councils had access to. LP is a very different beast now and not much interested in local gov, which is a shame. More of a shame is that there are now few councils sharing this kind of content and instead having to but it individually or create it themselves. Someone (huh) should bring the shared library back!
- Nick reminded me of the existence of GovGroups, and I gave it a quick spring clean. Worth checking out if you need a simple online group for something.
Media consumption:
- We had never watched CItizen Kane so have started that. Also halfway through Netflix Damon/Affleck number The Rip which I am liking more than anyone else.
- Now that the new series of Traitors has finished, we have started watching it, because binging.
- Have started Until I find You by John Irving. I think I have read it before, as bits feel familiar, but that could just be the usual Irving wrestling, unreliable memory, weird sex, odd family dynamics stuff. It’s good, but then I really like his stuff.
Mahad Kalam – The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site:
The UK Government recently unveiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC for the low, low price of.. £4.1 million (~$5,657,000).
It is not good. Like, at all – the UI is insanely bad and it’s clear that this was just a vibecoded site (to be fair, this is the AI Skills Hub, but c’mon, where is the pride in your work? I would be ashamed to even release this as a prototype!)
Also on this, Scotty Quilter – The UK Government’s AI Skills Hub: A Critical Analysis:
On 28 January 2026, the UK Government launched an expanded AI Skills Hub with the ambitious goal of upskilling 10 million workers by 2030. Backed by £27 million in public funding and partnerships with 25+ organisations, this initiative has been presented as Britain’s answer to the AI skills crisis. However, a closer examination reveals fundamental flaws in both design and execution that risk undermining the very goals the programme seeks to achieve.
Wednesday, 28 January, 2026
Carl Haggerty – Introducing the Chrysalis Work:
Working in a council right now can feel a lot like being inside a chrysalis. The old shape of things is still visible – job titles, structures, budgets, habits – but much of what we relied on no longer quite fits, and what’s emerging isn’t yet clear.
The language of “transformation” is everywhere. New operating models, corporate programmes, refreshed strategies, renamed projects – on paper it looks and sounds like big change. But when I tune into what it actually feels like inside, most of what has been labelled “transformation” has been far more modest: service‑by‑service tweaks, done at pace, layered onto old structures, old habits and the same silos that quietly shape everything.
Monday, 26 January, 2026
John Gruber reports on the new version of OmniOutliner (6) which includes a featured called Omni Links:
OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the advantages to library-based apps is that they more easily allow the developer to create custom URL schemes to link to items in the app’s library. Omni Links is an ambitious solution to bring that to document-based apps. Omni Links let you copy URLs that link not just to an OmniOutliner document, but to any specific row within an OmniOutliner document. And you can paste those URLs into any app you want (like, say, Apple Notes or Things, or events in your calendar app). From the perspective of other apps, they’re just URLs that start with omnioutliner://. They’re not based on anything as simplistic as a file’s pathname. They’re a robust way to link to a unique document, or a specific row within that document. Create an Omni Link on your Mac, and that link will work on your iPhone or iPad too — or vice versa. This is a very complex problem to solve, but Omni Links delivers on the age-old promise of “It just works”, abstracting all the complexity.
I’ve been using OmniOutliner for years, to help structure longer documents and put ideas into some kind of order. Am going to have to try this out, because I’m hoping it will let me link to external documents from within an outline – for example to where I am writing up the thing listed in the outline. I know what I mean anyway.
There’s another Mac app which might do something vaguely similar called Hookmark, which I have never gotten round to checking out properly.
📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 23 January 2026
Blogging has been a little light this week. Just not that much stuff to link to, and I’ve been in a headspace where I’ve not had too many share-worthy thoughts or ideas. I’ve been tired – maybe that’s the reason.
I also didn’t post this on Friday but left it til the following Monday! Silly David.
This week’s worky highlights:
- Some more great chats with people about Skillstats, which fills me with hope that this might be a thing and eventually contribute to me being able to retire at some point in the next few decades (an increasing concern as the years pass…!)
- A lovely chat with Marcus Rees-Harris. We definitely have met at some point, we are sure, but it was lovely to have a proper chat with someone I have been connected to online for some time. He is thriving in a new role, and it was great to see.
- Been working with Nick on LGR Camp, which is now open for registration.
Not really work stuff:
- Had a nice discussion over email with Giles Turnbull about finding files in MacOS (I suggested trying out HoudahSpot and Find any File)
Media consumption:
- Finished the Pirates of the Caribbean series of films. Fourth was very poor, I thought, the fifth and final one slightly better.
- Watched The War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise one) again with the family and found it kind of ok but also weirdly low stakes.
- Have found the Past, Present, Future podcast presented by David Runciman really interesting and it makes a break from all the football ones I otherwise listen to.