An online notebook
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An online notebook
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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!
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…
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…
Laura Czapiewski – Why human trust shapes AI success: The psychology of digital has never been more important than now, in the age of AI. There are countless examples of where AI has proved to be far more reliable than…
Wow – Microsoft Copilot blamed by Chief Constable for Maccabi Tel Aviv ban: The incident and subsequent review have reignited debates about police decision-making, community engagement, and the balance between public safety and fairness in policing high-profile events. It has…
I have been frustrated with the state of the categories on this blog for some years now. That’s right – years. This site has been going in one form or another for over 20 years – the first post being…
AI is not a strategy, it’s a tactic. Once all the fuss has settled down, we will be in a position where specific AI tools are useful in specific circumstances – it won’t have “transformed” anything. We had exactly this…
I newslettered earlier. # – micropost 23087 i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging. I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily…
A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw: Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and…
Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more: Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s…
Giles Turnbull: The strategy is enquiry What I’m suggesting is a new approach for the times when there’s a perceived need for a document called a “strategy”. It shouldn’t be a document full of “we will”; it should be a…
MacOS icon history. # – micropost 23027 The hidden fundamentals of digital transformation in healthcare: how to roll out nationally in a local system – by Jane Maber on the dxw blog: There’s no question that the technical challenge is…
Brent’s Innovation Journey: Building a ‘Base’ for Local Government Innovation by Ryan Hamilton on the LOTI blog: At Brent, we’ve been trying to rethink how we tackle problems in a way that makes ‘innovation’ not just a buzzword, but a…
AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI. # – micropost 22995 Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”. # – micropost 22996 Ben Unsworth is…