📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more: Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s…

📅 Daily note for 26 January 2024

Remember my course! It might be really helpful for you or a colleague! Excellent podcast about what Iran is up to these days. Giles thinks learning materials in organisations ought to be better quality, and of course he is right.…

LINK: “Building the GOV.UK of the future”

We need to prepare for a world where people might not access GOV.UK through their computer or smartphone, but could be using Alexa, Google Assistant or some technology that hasn’t even been created yet. We need to make GOV.UK understandable…

Five for Friday (19/5/17)

Five more nuggets of interest I’ve spotted this week: Jessica Lessin built a business to prove information doesn’t have to be free – great podcast about the different models emerging for journalism online. The Information is a great site, by the…

Working openly on the web

There was a nice guest post from Doug Belshaw from Mozilla on Brian Kelly’s blog last week. Entitled What Does Working Openly on the Web Mean in Practice?, it told us a bit about Mozilla’s culture of openness and how…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: ongoing by Tim Bray · Software in 2014 Joho the Blog » What blogging was – *sniff* Is Local GDS a good idea? « @demsoc Let’s Replace Council Websites with Local.Gov.Uk…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Lockdown – Marco.org (thoughts on RSS etc) Doug Engelbart, visionary David Wilcox » Realising the knowledge assets of research for the rest of us – how about a set of recipe…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Taming the Python – geting started programming on your Raspberry Pi Battle for the planet of the APIs Returning to Free Software: A Guide Robots and Robber Barons – NYTimes.com via…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Toe and HTTPS | Electronic Frontier Foundation The Dark Side of E-Books To the internet giants, you’re not a customer. You’re just another user – by @jjn1 meandering thoughts on the…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: David Wilcox » As the Knowledge Hub faces closure, might a creative Twitter mob help with re-invention? the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist Make and share useful lists | Gini Google…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Home – Lincoln Matrix Richard Stallman: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs “My favorite programming language:” Google’s Go has some coders raving | Ars Technica David Wilcox »â€¦

Online PR – join in or be left behind

I admit it: I wasn’t always that interested in the internet and social media.

In all honesty I was a tad old-school – I’d started out as a newspaper journalist before the internet really took off, and before social media became mainstream.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Councils — Kill your PDFs – Some sage advice from Adrian Short – stop publishing so many PDFs! Evolving Digital Engagement – From Participation to Partnership – "This report reviews the…

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. BDU: Big Data – E-learning about "big data" which people keep telling me is going to be important. WP2Cloud – Interesting one for WordPress dorks (like me). Stores all your…

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. Are open standards a closed barrier? | Government Digital Service – "Fresh out of a roundtable discussion on the Open Standards: Open Opportunities consultation, Linda Humphries discusses whether open can really…

Bookmarks for February 23rd through April 4th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. Reaping the benefits of shared services – Interesting interview with @terryhuggins on the shared services arrangement between South Holland and East Lindsay councils. UK IT Strategy Sets the Pace for…

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to. Living with rats: Nine signposts towards Our Society – Good stuff from @juliandobson Wikileaks and the Long Haul – Shirky on Wikileaks What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us –…