📅 Weekly note for 5-9 February 2024

This started off as a daily not for Monday, and has been sat in draft all week as I add more and more to it…


Had a proper chance to watch this and read about it – “Place-Based Public Service Budgets: Making Public Money Work Better for Communities”. Nice bit of big picture thinking around local public services. We need more of this sort of thing.


Bluesky is now open for anyone to join. No more invite codes! It’s like Twitter used to be. See you there?

This is rather lovely from dxw – “Content design: the very first step”.

Looking at Beehiiv as a potential Substack replacement. That spelling though, yikes.

Talking of which, I sent out the first newsletter of the year this week.

Resetting digital government – this piece from Jerry Fishenden has attracted a lot of attention.


In Neil’s recent week note, he linked to a bunch of interesting approaches:


Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany.

This is an interesting piece about YouTube and how content creators chase the revenue, resulting in a worse experience for viewers, and how this is resonant of the way the web went.


Nice video from Giles Turnbull, giving a talk to folk from the state government in British Columbia about using the human voice in communication.


How not to get fired

Great post by Neil Williams on how civil servants can approach blogging in a way that means they will get readers but won’t lose their jobs:

Starting up your own personal blog is dead easy. Unless you’re a civil servant and want to talk about your work.

If you are, then you face this choice: play it safe and say nothing interesting ever, or do some homework to learn where the boundaries lie. As ‘Mr Newest Blogging Civil Servant UK’, I’ve been doing the latter: reading up on what I can and can’t (or should and shouldn’t) say.

Yay! Another Govblogger!

A big welcome to the blogosphere to Neil Williams, all round good government web egg, who has started a blog called Mission Creep. He says in his opening post:

It genuinely feels like exciting, important things are starting to happen in government’s use of web right now. It just got really interesting, and I’m going all in.

Neil has done a stack of cool stuff, like getting David Miliband started with his blog, for example, so I really do recommend folk subscribe to him and listen to what he has to say.

He’s on Twitter, too, by the way…