An online notebook
Get posts by weekly email:
An online notebook
Phil Rumens writes a thoughtful piece on the use of open source software in local government: When open-source is discussed in the public sector, it is usually framed around transparency and reuse. The code behind products and tools built with…
New guidance published on GOV.UK – AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector: User research suggests that the primary driver of exploitation risk is the presence of weaknesses in systems – including unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure implementation, and…
Will Callaghan writes Elections and the Community Fund: … last week the fund had another major success. Three council Democratic Services teams switched from using their old software to the latest version of LocalGov Drupal Elections, paid for by contributions…
Terence Eden writes [the] NHS Goes To War Against Open Source: …this is not the correct response to the purported threat by Mythos. Neither the AI Safety Institute nor the NCSC recommend this action. While there may be some increase…
The National Digital Exchange is a really neat idea that is looking more and more impressive. Basically, it’s a way to try out local government software – often open source – without needing to buy it first or run costly…
Cloudflare have released a new open source CMS, that they are billing as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress. Unsurprisingly, Matt Mullenweg has views: The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend…
Terence Eden – How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?: When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is…
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…
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…
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…
WordPress 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…
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…
Quickly grabbing some connectivity at a friend’s house, so I thought I would share this post – originally published on the Learning Pool blog – outlining just how much money the public sector has saved by working with us to…
Jonathan Schwarz, then CEO of Sun Microsystems: As will become more obvious by the day, you can compete against a product, but it’s close to impossible to compete against a community.
Another post I have been sat on and chewing over for a little while… Charles Arthur in the Guardian highlighted an interesting area of discussion in the use of open source in government a little while ago. He reports on…
Here’s a nice little video we have produced to help people understand the benefits of the Learning Pool learning management system – what we call the DLE. It’s a cloud-based implementation of the open source Moodle platform, with some added…
A lovely story of sharing, reusing and creative hacking in government today. There’s a whole post to be written on hacker culture and why government needs people who are able to program computers on the payroll. You just can’t outsource…
I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the advisory group for the Knowledge Hub (KHub) last Tuesday (sorry for the delay in writing this up…). Steve Dale chaired the day which featured a number of updates about the project, in terms…
Stephen O’Grady has a great post analysing where the open source software movement is in the Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline model. Why would commercial organizations willingly cede the fruits of their labor to a market that might include their…
If you visit this site in a browser, rather than just getting the content via your RSS reader, you’ll notice it looks a bit different. I have reverted the site to the new default theme for WordPress whilst I figure…