Carl Haggerty – Introducing the Chrysalis Work: Working in a council right now can feel a lot like being inside a chrysalis. The old shape of things is still visible – job titles, structures, budgets, habits – but much of…
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
📅 Daily Note: December 2, 2025
Gavin Beckett – Harnessing the changing landscape of local government to create internet era organisations: Effective responses to complex, long-standing social challenges need to be co-designed and co-produced with people and community organisations that grow from the ground up. Modern…
📅 Daily Note: September 23, 2025
Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team: We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or…
The core problem in local government digital is capacity
This is the content of the ‘article’ element of the email newsletter I sent last week. Publishing here for posterity. 2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year in local government digital, largely due to the impact of the Localism bill…
Localise Live! – monthly chats for local government folk
Join me for a light-hearted hour of sharing challenges, ideas, and experience about innovating in local public services. Localise Live! takes place on the last Thursday of every month at 12pm until 1pm and is open to public sector people only.…
On user groups for local government software
Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it? It seems like vendors are keen to say…
📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025
Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working. # – micropost 22920 Some interesting notes on the issues around the software market for local government. # – micropost 22934 My general take…
📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025
Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good. In…
📅 Daily Note: December 18, 2024
Ed Zitron: The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an…
📅 Daily note for 4 September 2024
Charlie Fountaine kicked off⬈ one of those conversations on LinkedIn: Why isn’t there a cookie-cutter website for local councils in the UK?…Imagine if we had a common system, similar to central government’s approach, with shared components and a unified content…