Events

📅 Daily Note: September 18, 2025

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 website full of “what we’re learning”.

Use it to demonstrate your institutional capability to test and learn, to enquire and be curious.

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Key learnings from GOV.UK One Login discovery research for local government:

Key themes emerging from the research include:

  • cost savings are essential – councils told us this would be critical to secure leadership buy-in
  • identity verification is a USP – councils value secure verification and the potential to share credentials across local and central government
  • suppliers are open to integration – many are already using, or moving towards, OpenID Connect (OIDC) compatibility
  • forward thinking but stretched – councils want to future-proof systems, but limited resources, capability, and competing priorities are barriers
  • user adoption risks – concerns about digital exclusion, resident trust, and the transitioning of users to a new system

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Dave Winer, It’s really simple:

FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, it’s a real editor that supports all the features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. How could they miss that? Markdown is like MP3. If you’re mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It’s there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you’re mixing text you’re mixing Markdown.

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Really Simple Licensing – “The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet”.

RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation.

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Avoiding the hidden costs of leadership debt – Oli Lovell, Public Digital:

Technical debt is well recognised. But the same logic of ever-shifting organisational needs – and therefore the debt accrued by standing still – applies to leadership too. As a leader, your skills, models and culture operate as a system of their own, determining how well your organisation is able to adapt and respond to change.

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Decision making at the right level with Hats, Haircuts and Tattoos by Emily Webber:

What I like about these definitions is that they provide a framework for considering a decision, while also allowing for the differences and nuances of the situation and the experience of the people making them.

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This is a fair challenge:

i know its a lot easier to book the same recurring slot every fortnight / month

but its quite depressing seeing group after group you never get to attend, because they always meet on your non working day 😔

I did the lazy thing with Localise Live! but probably should have mixed it up a bit more. I will be making recordings available to people who sign up, so maybe I need to make it clearer that people should sign up even if they can’t make the meetings, so they get that access…

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David Gerrard – UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI

The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

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How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash:

There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done” ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions.

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James Plunkett writes What does digital-era healthcare really mean?

When the UK government published its 10 Year Plan for Health two months ago, there was general support for its direction of travel: shifting from analogue to digital, from hospitals to communities, and from treatment to prevention.

The question people asked is whether the healthcare system has the capability to deliver these shifts. Or, put more bluntly, ‘we’ve heard this all before, so why is this time different?’

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🔗 Some links I’ve spotted recently

I sent out a newsletter today and included these links at the bottom. Popping them here for posterity…

Interesting links – 9 Feb 2021

More nuggets spotted online, shared for your edutainment.

5 tips on running virtual events – DWP Digital

One of the biggest learning points for the events team was that you can’t take a plan for a physical event and simply run it virtually instead. It just doesn’t work. You need to create a way to engage attendees remotely, while they’re having to do most of their work through their screens, from their home. However, virtual events have a lot of opportunities for being inclusive and allowing people to join in regardless of whether they can travel to another location.

Link

Retail, rent and things that don’t scale — Benedict Evans

Part of the promise of the internet is that you can take things that only worked in big cities and scale them everywhere. In the off-line world, you could never take that unique store in London or Milan and scale it nationally or globally – you couldn’t get the staff, and there wasn’t the density of the right kind of customer (and that’s setting aside the problem that scaling it might make people less interested anyway). But as the saying goes, ‘the internet is the densest city on earth’, so theoretically, any kind of ‘unscalable’ market should be able to find a place on the internet. Everyone can find their tribe.

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Being Human – Catherine Howe

Bureaucracies are designed to protect themselves from harm – they have formal complaint routes and escalations and a hierarchy that is there to maintain the status quo. And when you look at a wider context you can see some of the drivers for this – the more we see a world based on risk and blame the harder it is for us to be human and authentic in our interactions.The first time fix of customer services is allowed for simple questions – to go there with more complex stuff brings levels of risks that most bureacracies are not comfortable with as it takes you to the place of difficult choices and trade off – the messiness of complexity.

Link

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET – Two Bit History

Today, the internet is a lifeline that keeps us tethered to each other even as an airborne virus has us all locked up indoors. So it’s easy to imagine that, if the ARPANET was the first draft of the internet, then surely the world that existed before it was entirely disconnected, since that’s where we’d be without the internet today, right? The ARPANET must have been a big deal because it connected people via computers when that hadn’t before been possible.

That view doesn’t get the history quite right. It also undersells what made the ARPANET such a breakthrough.

Link

Covering events with Kind of Digital

One bit of work we’ve been doing a fair bit of at Kind of Digital is putting events on the web. One example is the seminar that took place in Leeds yesterday, run by Local Government Yorkshire and Humber.

The idea is that these public service type events are all about getting the message to as many people as possible – which usually is a lot more than those in the room at the time.

Rather than live streaming we take the approach of getting event speakers and organisations, and occasionally delegates, to provide short interviews about the event and what they will be talking about.

We also take photos, and can live blog and tweet, too. The content is uploaded to YouTube and Flickr, etc, and we can create a microsite to host the content too, if required.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the Kind of Digital media maven that is Andrew Beeken, who is a dab hand with a camera and editing video.

It seems to work well, and all our clients so far have been pleased with the cost-effective results. If you have an event coming up that would benefit from this, do drop me a line on dave@kindofdigital.com.

Announcing moreopen micro-grants

Cross-posted from the new blog over on moreopen.org, here Steph announces some small-scale funding available for public sector-oriented digital events and projects:

As UKGovcamp 2011 fades into the memory, and exciting events such as ShropCamp (19 April) hove into view, it’s time to formally lift the veil on our mini grant scheme to help get more great public sector digital innovation off the ground.

UKGovcamp was a great event, and we managed to bring in enough sponsorship to cover costs, and set up a small fund to support follow up events. So far, four have been supported:

  • ShropCamp: how social media and open data can help service providers to work more effectively at a local level in and around Shropshire
  • Youth Work Online: the third national get-together of people interested in using the social web for youth engagement and participation
  • Localgovcamp: the national get-together of local government folk, held in Birmingham, to talk about digital stuff at a local level
  • MailCamp [working title]: a show-and-tell seminar event on how effective use of email can help public sector organisations reach audiences more cheaply and drive engagement at scale

But to cut a long story short, there’s still a bit of money in the pot, so we’re inviting applications from individuals and teams who have an idea for an event or project which ticks the following boxes:

  1. Is for people in, or interested in, the UK public sector
  2. Is about transparency, engagement or collaboration involving new technologies
  3. Doesn’t have much – if any – other funding or sponsors, and needs help to cover catering, venue or logistics costs
  4. Is run on a not-for-profit basis; ideally free to participants

So it might be that you want to run a weekend localgovcamp in your area. Or you might want to get together a group of people new to this stuff and run a pecha kucha evening. Or you might want to focus on something specific like film-making or consultation or using Facebook effectively in the public sector, and get people to show-and-tell their experiences.

The application process is really simple: use the application form on this site to tell us:

  • a little bit about who you are
  • what your event or project is about
  • what you need the money for

You can bid for any amount up to £1,000, but we expect most grants for small events to be around £250 or £500: enough to cover pizzas or a large room if you can’t find one for free.

The grant scheme will be run on a rolling basis, until the money runs out, so don’t delay in making your application. Having a bit of seed funding behind you will hopefully make you a stronger candidate for sponsorship by other organisations, so the idea is to help you get the ball rolling.

FAQs

  1. Can you run the event for me?
    No, sorry. We just help with a bit of money. We’re still knackered from organising UKGovcamp.
  2. OK, but can you promote it for me?
    To an extent, we’d love to. We’ll tweet and blog about it here, and can set you up with a subsite on http://www.ukgovcamp.com if you want. In any case, we recommend you set up a group and get people talking about the event, to sound out interest and ideas for content.
  3. How big is the grant fund?
    Not very. A few grand altogether.
  4. I’ve got an idea but I’m not sure it’s what you’re looking for
    Drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking about. There’s no harm in asking, and it’s a very informal process.

 

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