Jo Carter – “Your survey is lying to you: uncovering the pitfalls”: A survey is a tempting thing. It looks inviting, it’s free to pick up, yet it can do a surprising amount of damage, especially when people don’t realise…

Tom Wynne-Morgan, Deputy Director for CustomerFirst posts on the GDS blog – Testing a different way to improve complex public services: CustomerFirst is exploring how teams can solve whole problems in practice when authority, incentives and accountability are fragmented, and…

Richard Pope: Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services: The principles of what makes a well-designed service remain the same as in the pre-AI digital era. AI should be treated as a design material rather than as a…

Not come across LOTI’s service innovation cards before, but they are lovely and would be really interested to learn about how it plays out in a workshop setting. It reminds me somewhat of the good old days of the social…

The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns. It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in…

Dennis Vergne – The Hidden History of Relational Public Services: From the Coal Mine to the Front Door: It is not a single invention, but a recurring discovery made by different people in different decades (miners, social workers, nurses, economists,…

📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service. # – micropost 22965 Ben Holliday: New ways of organising: What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard…

📅 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: December 12, 2024

It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly. # – micropost 22785…

📅 Daily note for 26 November 2024

My new shed, sorry, home office is coming along nicely. It’s quite big! # Transforming the DBT Intranet⬈ – where DBT = ‘Department for Business and Trade’. # Visualising Government as a Platform⬈ – by Ben Welby. # Getting into service design⬈,…

📅 Daily note for 4 October 2024

Jukesie shares his ideas⬈ for the new Digital Centre Design Panel⬈. They are very sensible. # Steve⬈ has shared a really good looking intro to product management course⬈ – it’s online and free. # How government defines a service⬈ (via…

📅 Daily note for 18 September 2024

Am looking into intranets at the moment for a customer. If you have any good stuff to share, please do let me know! Have already heard from Essex County Council and of course Eleanor’s wonderful post⬈ on the topic too.…

📅 Daily note for 9 July 2024

Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLG⬈ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSIT⬈ (the Department for…

Daily note for 22 January 2024

I am running a 6 week online course about making a success of digital in your organisation. You can find out more and book on the SensibleTech website. Neil Lawrence’s GovCamp write up (Medium, meh). AI, data, and public services…

Daily note for 19 January 2024

A minor innovation in these daily notes – pulling out the occasional quote from some of the links, and then using a horizontal line to provide some separation. Also using the lines to make it clear when a multiple-paragraph comment…

Daily note for 29 October 2023

LocalGovCamp was lovely last Wednesday but exhausting. I did very well not to drink much at all the night before which definitely helped. But… so many people to talk to, so much going on. I attended way more sessions than…

Daily note for 6 October 2023

Sent out a newsletter yesterday. It features some notes on building network of digital enthusiasts in your organisation. The innovation igloo about service patterns was fun today. We talked about service patterns and referenced the Essex/FutureGov work, the GDS Verify-inspired…

Daily note for 22 September 2023

“While we are thinking about the future, the present is still happening.” Julian Thompson in his keynote at Service Design in Government. Saw this quote shared a number of times and I love it! Tass has put together a website…