governance

📅 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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📅 Daily Note: September 3, 2025

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 practical, everyday reality in local government.

That journey led us to something exciting: We will soon be launching ‘The Base’ , a dedicated space at the Civic Centre (both physical and cultural) where bold ideas, agile working and collaborative experimentation come to life.

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What makes a good outcome? by Jamie Arnold:

In the world of digital and organisational change, being able to define and communicate a strong outcome is a leadership superpower. Whether you’re working on a product, service, or internal shift, a well-crafted outcome sets direction, aligns teams, and builds momentum. Here’s how to make your outcomes truly effective.

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New book to improve accessibility of Welsh digital public services – from the Centre for Digital Public Services.

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I like the idea of “digital everywhere” – amongst a whole range of brilliant ideas and reflections from Catherine Howe:

Digital everywhere: The embedding of digital practitioners within services alongside a digital skills development program is something I feel we’ve tested in a limited way but clearly it works when done right and I’m really looking forward to having the capacity to develop this approach. This requires a really strong approach to making sure those digital roles are properly designed and also wired into the core digital team as well as clear guide rails that need to be context sensitive.

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Product strategy, prioritisation frameworks and responding to change by Alan Wright:

Product teams often face more opportunities than they can act on, with new ones arising all the time. This post explores the link between strategy and priorities, when prioritisation frameworks help or hinder, and how to empower teams to make smart, timely decisions as new opportunities emerge.

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From Strategy to Strolls: A Few Weeks of Progress and Pauses, by Atika:

One of the standout achievements in the last few weeks was securing approval for our new strategic framework and governance model. This marks a significant step forward in aligning our digital ambitions with the Council’s broader priorities. The framework, shaped through collaboration and challenge, is now the backbone of how we’ll deliver impact—anchored in transparency, agility, and accountability. We’re also making good progress on the TOM work to make sure we have the culture and capability to deliver this.

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The courage to digitally transform with the Digital Layer and AI – interesting talk from Mark Thompson.

 

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LINK: “Full stack decision making”

I know that many organisations are still designed around that hierarchy but if your goal is to end up with an organisation that is less silo’d at the same time as being more collaborative, adaptive and flexible it seems sensible to look to the thinking which is designed to support a more sophisticated view of decision making then that of a hierarchy where things get rolled up and then down the hill to get an decision.

Original: http://www.curiouscatherine.info/2018/08/16/full-stack-decision-making/

A good social media policy is a good idea

Newcastle United, in an apparent break in their usual culture, appear to have done something sensible:

Newcastle United’s players will shortly be given guidelines about their tweeting habits. Alan Pardew was annoyed last Tuesday when José Enrique, his Spanish left-back, informed Twitter followers he would miss the team’s game at Tottenham through injury. As Enrique, happily restored to fitness for tomorrow’s trip to Wigan, is a key player, Pardew had intended keeping his absence quiet until the teamsheets appeared.

OK, so maybe a policy just for Twitter is over the top…

In an ideal world, no organisation should need a policy setting out the dos and don’ts of online interaction. After all, all the compliance stuff ought to be covered in existing policies on bringing the organisation into disrepute, communications, information security and that kind of thing.

But with new and emerging technology, sometimes you just need to spell things out a bit more clearly.

After all, it’s a potentially messy and complicated situation, especially when a member of staff is using a personal channel to communicate with friends and family.

The golden rule for me is that if someone can be in any way connected back to their employer, then they have to start thinking about how what they say might be traced back.

Even better, assume everyone knows and can see everything about you – friends and family but also your boss, and the media too.

But a good social media policy isn’t really about what staff shouldn’t do. It’s role should be to encourage and promote the right behaviour online. Don’t put something online that you wouldn’t say in a meeting, to a journalist or to your mum. If you do, then be aware that you’re taking a risk.

The civil service guidelines are a good starting point here – brief, and positive:

  • Be credible
    Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
  • Be consistent
    Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
  • Be responsive
    When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
  • Be integrated
    Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
  • Be a civil servant
    Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

I would add Be aware to this list – make it a part of people’s duties to keep an eye on what is being said online and to take the web and online communities seriously.

Don’t clog your policy up with lists of rules about what to do and what not to do on the internet. Instead, encourage staff to be open and transparent, and confident that they are doing the right thing.