I’m back! First daily note in a while. Hope you are as pleased with me as I am 😁
The blog has been rehosted, meaning I can save a bit of money shutting down an old hosting account. Have also changed the theme, going from the venerable Twenty-Fifteen⬈ which has served me well for a long old while.
I’ve gone for GeneratePress⬈, which is a very bare-bones (the idea being that you can customise it to do whatever you like). I’m just tweaking it here and there to keep things light and simple. I’ve avoided blog-tinkering for a while, but it’s quite nice to change things up.
I’ve tried to trim down the number of RSS feeds I am checking on the regular in NetNewsWire⬈. Am subscribed to over 400 but huge numbers of those are inactive these days, and others I rarely check. So, have split them into two folders, Must reads and Nice to reads. The latter stays shut unless I’m desperate for something to look at!
Eddie Copeland posted an interesting aside⬈ on language and how he isn’t using the word digital much, and it seems to be working for him. Fair enough! I’m a bit horses-for-courses on this one really, sometimes it can be a helpful word, sometimes not. Depends on the organisation’s context I guess.
When I do say ‘digital’ these days though, I invariably follow it up by saying that it is a simple shorthand for technology, data, and online experience.
I love this quote from Matt King in his post the future of digital is already here⬈:
Working in public sector digital environments can often involve an almost disorientating sense of deja-vu, where a chance phrase drops you deep into a flashback to the previous times you had a similar conversation. When this first happens, it’s tempting to think that you’re getting old, and that either that the organisation you’re working with has ignored the last 15 years, or that the case for digital change is doomed. The reality is usually that none of these things apart from the getting old bit is true, and that the organisation you’re dealing with is both ahead of the curve in a few places and has missed some stuff in other places. The future of digital is not very evenly distributed at the moment – it’s pretty bumpy – but what we’ll see in the next 15 years is that distribution improving.
Going down to London and speaking at the Town Hall 2030 launch on Tuesday was pretty exhausting but also inspiring. I love the fact that the lens for quite a few big beast policy types is now on local public service delivery.
With the likely new government on its way, it feels like a very optimistic time, which is a very nice feeling to have. I came away with many thoughts that I will try and wrangle into posts in the near future.
Does this actually work? #
