Daily note for 14 September 2023

These notes have been a bit less daily of late.

I’m chatting to a couple of smaller councils at the moment who are looking to significantly refresh their websites. It struck me that there really ought to a be a go-to playbook on the steps to go through, to avoid utterly pointless wheel reinvention. Of course, there isn’t one, so I am recruiting people to help me put it together. Do please join in!

As an aside, it’s quite interesting using Trello as a means of doing pretty much everything in a collaborative project, including using specific cards as discussion threads, and so on. It’s a remarkably flexible tool, really good at almost everything (except managing projects, ho ho!)

I newslettered yesterday, mostly about the concept of ‘legacy’ in local government tech and what to do about it.

Focusing on just outcomes leads to whacky tech decisions” – more along the ‘it’s not not about the technology’ lines.

Lessons for implementing digital health technologies

I quite like this distinction: “Federation vs Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Lots of stuff coming out about how Chrome is increasingly unethical as a browser, what with its data collecting and whatnot. Mark, amongst others, is using Firefox, which as a suggestion feels delightfully old school to me. Handily, Mozilla have just published a guide to switching from one to the other.

LINK: “Understanding legacy technology in government”

“I think we have to accept that there’s going to be legacy stuff out there, and there’s going to be unsupported systems. So it would be better to accept that we’ve got that and come up with strategies for how we’re going to manage that.”

Original: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/24/understanding-legacy-technology-in-government/

LINK: “Fail by design: Banking′s legacy of dark code”

Is it modernize or die? Or modernize and die? For banks updating their computer systems with secure mobile features it can be both. Many run mainframes on legacy code that’s gone dark — no one understands it anymore.

Original: http://www.dw.com/en/fail-by-design-bankings-legacy-of-dark-code/a-43645522