Thanks to Tom Watson’s post about A TechFreedom startup stack, I came across Baserow, which looks like a very well featured, slightly cheaper, open source based alternative to AirTable. Handy!

Johnny Williams – No Ivory Towers Here Please (LinkedIn warning): What DSIT hasn’t done is build sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure below that GOV.UK front door. Standardising the citizen-facing layer is a different achievement from owning the plumbing underneath it,…

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…

📅 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…

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…

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…

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…

Saving lots of lolly with Learning Pool

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…

Products vs. Communities

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.

Open source and government

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…

The dynamic learning environment

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…

Update on the Knowledge Hub

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…