Dave Richardson at Newark and Sherwood District Council – Nine Councils. One Message. A playbook for Multi‑Council Digital Collaboration: When all nine councils across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were tasked with communicating the complexities of local government reorganisation (LGR), it was…

Mike Gallagher – In public : Notes on working in the open: The phrase “make things open: it makes things better” gets tossed around a lot and sounds simple, but I think it encapsulates a profound set of ideas that…

Mahad Kalam – The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site: The UK Government recently unveiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC…

Am finding the WP Reset plugin useful, particularly at the start of a project where I might be trying lots of different stuff out. Quickly takes a site back to the bare bones, clearing out the database and so on,…

Carl Haggerty – Introducing the Chrysalis Work: Working in a council right now can feel a lot like being inside a chrysalis. The old shape of things is still visible – job titles, structures, budgets, habits – but much of…

John Gruber reports on the new version of OmniOutliner (6) which includes a featured called Omni Links: OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the…

Laura Czapiewski – Why human trust shapes AI success: The psychology of digital has never been more important than now, in the age of AI. There are countless examples of where AI has proved to be far more reliable than…

Lovely post from Luton’s Ben McCartney on the improvements he and his team have been making to the service desk at the council.

Government customer services to be modernised with help of industry experts: The government is launching CustomerFirst, a new unit within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, to modernise public services and improve the experience for millions of people who…

A roadmap for modern digital government: Our plan to build a modern digital government that works for you – making life easier, driving growth and delivering smarter, more efficient public services

📅 Weeknote w/e Friday 16 January 2026

Let’s see how long I can keep this up for! This week’s worky highlights: We are recruting for two big roles at Luton Head of Innovation Delivery and Data Deputy Data Protection Officer & Compliance Improvement Manager Also at Luton,…

Fixed an issue in my Tidycal appointment booking thingy, where Teams meetings were being booked but no meeting link provided. It was a simple case of disconnecting the accounts and then reconnecting them (yup, turn it off and on again,…

Wow – Microsoft Copilot blamed by Chief Constable for Maccabi Tel Aviv ban: The incident and subsequent review have reignited debates about police decision-making, community engagement, and the balance between public safety and fairness in policing high-profile events. It has…

Now I’m wondering whether I should just put everything pre-2026 into an ‘Archive’ category and just start afresh from this year… A though just occurred – part of the reason why the categories are in a mess is probably because…

Some major reworking of this blog over the last few days. Dramatically simplified things – sadly the micropost format that Steph helped me build didn’t make the cut. Instead I am making use of the default WordPress ‘asides’ post format…

Roger Swannell – Getting agile governance right: In a traditional waterfall or stage-gated development process quality assurance and approval checks happen towards the end of the work. It makes sense if you’re optimising for efficiency as all the quality check…

Wise words as always from Catherine Howe – Change is a layered thing: There is an alchemy to taking stuff you have already and turning it into something different but I think that’s the essence of organisational change. You are…

Terrific list of recommended posts from Steve Messer.

I hadn’t noticed that Canva had bought Affinity and made it free. How long it will stay that way, who knows, but seems a good deal to grab for the meantime.

Nina Belk, dxw – Improving the transition from policy to delivery with service patterns: ‘Service patterns’ are reusable building blocks that help teams to design services end-to-end and front-to-back, in a coherent and consistent way, making them easier to deliver…