open source

📅 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 councils need new capabilities that enable them to work well with a constellation of partners, thinking about the network’s ability to create teams and services that wrap around the person and family, rather than assuming that the council must create top-down solutions themselves. They need to be effective conveners, brokers and collaborators in the ecosystem of the whole place.

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Atika writes One Year On: Building Digital Momentum in Luton:

Twelve months ago, I stepped into the Director of Digital, Data and Technology role with a clear set of ambitions and a determination to help Luton Council move forward on its digital journey. Looking back, the transformation has been both challenging and rewarding—and, most importantly, it’s been a team effort.

Working with her has been great!

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Paul Brown – Everything I Got Wrong About Product (So You Don’t Have To)

That’s when it hit me: the lessons I’d want my son to know are the same lessons I wish someone had told me — the ones that stop you wasting years pretending you know the future, chasing the wrong goals, or mistaking movement for progress.

(via Neilly Neil)

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Nice story on the LOTI blog about adapting open source components in the Drupal system to make an AI-powered PDF scraper to help create more accessible HTML content on council websites.

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Another one from the LOTI blog, this time it’s Rethinking how councils buy technology by Katy Beale:

Procurement isn’t just a list of features. It’s about user experience and has the opportunity to spark service transformation and design better public services.

Hear, hear.

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Open source revenues and benefits

Am really chuffed to be a part of this project, funded by the team at DLUHC, to see how portable the in-house developed revenues and benefits system from Sedgemoor council is. We will also be looking at the licensing and governance model for making the system potentially open source – potentially a revolutionary move.

What’s also nice is that the project needed a home for its blog, and in an, er, semi-professional capacity, I was able to knock something up on LocalGov Blogs, along with the free version of the Blocksy theme.

As always when I run into WordPress issues, Steph Gray is on hand to help me. Thanks buddy!

WordPress 4.0 is out

Oh, goody. A new version of WordPress is out!

WordPress 4.0 is here, and it’s packed with new features:

  • New media manager
  • Embedded media now visual within the editor
  • The editor now works more smoothly, expanding as necessary to fit your content and keeping the formatting tools visible at all times
  • The plugin directory is a lot prettier and makes it easier to find the plugin you want

Here’s a video explaining it all.

[wpvideo bUdzKMro w=400 h=224]

How WordPress as a Platform helps nimble project delivery

wordpress-logoWordPress started as a blogging engine, then became a content management system, and these days is a platform for the development of simple web applications.

After all, an awful lot of applications are basically just about putting bits of text into boxes, and then arranging them in order to suit whatever your purpose is. Putting words into boxes is something WordPress is very good.

The bit of functionality within WordPress that enables this is the custom post type. You’re no longer limited to just blog style posts and static pages – you can create your own content types with their own taxonomies and as many different fields (boxes to put text in) as you like.

Here’s an example from a project I’m working on at the moment. It’s all about building up and managing a disparate community of people within a government department. I need to keep a record of all the members of this community, what they do, what interactions I have with them, whether they attend meetings and respond to surveys, etc etc.

The default position here would be to build an ever-growing spreadsheet in Excel, which would be increasingly difficult to manage and interrogate as it had more and more information added to it. I’ve done this in the past and it’s a nightmare.

Instead, of going down that route, I’ve spun up a quick WordPress instance and got he PauPress plugin installed and running. PauPress helps turn WordPress into a simple CRM (customer relationship management) system, which allows you to record details of contacts and your interactions with them.

Now, I would never dream of advocating the use of this as a corporate CRM solution for any critical purpose (it’s a bit clunky in places and I suspect with lots of data and users it could get pretty slow), but as a way of getting a simple, easy to use database up and running in minutes for a handful to people to be able to use, you really can’t beat it.

It’s a hack – a quick, cost effective and neat solution to a problem. It helps that WordPress is open source, with a huge developer community, which means that a simple Google search for “WordPress [what you want to do]” usually results in a few options to solve whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

What do you need to have in place for your organisation to be able to make the most of this stuff?

Obviously, somewhere to be able to quickly throw up new WordPress sites, and to install the necessary plugins to make this stuff happen. But also the skills and knowledge within your teams to be comfortable doing this and to advise others about making it all happen.

Houses and clouds

The Government Digital Service blog is essential reading. Two recent posts well worth a look:

What is that beautiful house?

The phrase “not a CMS” has become a bit of a joke around the GovUK office (to the point where more than a few people were humming Once In A Lifetime), but it’s a key part of our approach. The Single Domain will include several components that enable publishing on the web but they’re part of a much broader ecosystem of tools wired together using APIs and designed to be constantly iterated to focus on user need. As we began to unpack what that means it became clear that we were going to need custom software.

Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, attends seminar at No. 10 Downing Street

Dr. Vogels defined cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers”. Calling on his experience from across the globe he outlined how the flexibility and resilience offered by clouds has helped to transform some government instances via the idea of software as a service and the advent of reactive charging models. He gave the example of Recovery.gov in the US as just one of over 100 Government sites using cloud hosting.

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