An online notebook
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An online notebook
Finally got round to re-hosting localgov.blog onto a beefier slice of cloud. Also reworked how emails get sent out of the various blogs etc for new accounts, password resets and so on, which will make things a bit smoother for users.
SpinupWP made the migration a doddle and WPMailSMTP did the heavy lifting for the email stuff.
Giles points to a bunch of interesting things, including:
The Luton team show you can blog about anything, including the rollout of new printers.
Over the last few months, the DDaT team have been working on the refresh of the council’s fleet of printers with Ricoh being the new printer supplier…
The goals have been to improve functionality and performance using the latest technology to ensure cost-effective printing, reduced maintenance needs and better value for money.
This looks useful: Guidance and tools for digital accessibility on GOV.UK.
Following my linkage yesterday to the AI innovation in planning, Tom Loosemore weighs in on the unintended consequences:
One worry? Were I to put my mind to the grift, I could easily build a subscription service that would allow anyone to automatically write and send a well-founded and superbly researched objection to any planning application within half a mile of their property…
The end game has to be that the planning rules – or indeed the whole approach to planning – will have to change.
The BBC reports on Dorset Council testing AI to speed up planning applications:
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are being trialled in Dorset to help combat planning application delays.
The team of agents is helping Dorset Council planning officers with minor applications by reviewing documents and providing recommendations.
Dorset is one of three councils trialling the tool, developed by AI specialist Faculty on behalf of the government.
James O’Malley has written about it himself:
But if the AI works as intended, councils try the tools out, and the paperwork side of the job is sped up, this could be transformative. It will give overstretched planning officers more time to do the other parts of their jobs – which will reduce the time from an application going in to spades hitting the ground. And that’s not even to mention how much less annoying it will be to be on the other side of the planning process, as your application won’t be left in limbo for quite so long.
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 the risk they’re taking.
Most of the time, a survey is not the answer. And quite often, it’s making your decision-making worse, not better.
There is a lot of ERP talk at the moment, particularly in the light of LGR, and so I thought I would ask one of my robot friends to do some research into the state of things at the moment when it comes to finance, HR etc systems in local government.
You can find it here: https://bit.ly/lgerp
The procurement, deployment, and utilisation of Enterprise Resource Planning software in local government is currently at a critical inflection point. The historical era of the heavily customised, multi-year, on-premise monolithic ERP deployment is analytically, technically, and financially indefensible. The overwhelming market dynamics clearly indicate an aggressive, structural pivot toward integrated, multi-tenant cloud SaaS platforms designed to enforce standardised business processes and deliver rapid return on investment.
I have officially given up on fighting GoDaddy’s customer support and accepted that, for the time being, my locali.se domain is lost to me 😢
So the Localise website is now – and for the foreseeable future – found at localise.digital.
Will get on with sorting out the email mess shortly. In the meantime, I can be emailed at dave@sensibletech.co.uk as usual.
Great notes on transformation network building from Matt Wood-Hill:
Tangible products and artefacts helped build traction. Starting out as a product team gave us a big advantage. In order to co-design digital planning products at scale we had to collaborate across organisational boundaries and really work at our team culture, laying solid foundations for the future as things scaled. The products, which at the time were breaking new ground, helped attract the attention of others. They demonstrated that this group of people – predominantly from innovative local government teams – were serious about doing things differently.
Jerry Fishenden shares a useful batch of thinking about AI, etc.
This looks jolly interesting – NHS Operating Patterns:
Across the NHS, many people are already working differently – they are enacting a more dynamic kind of devolution, in which people collaborate to do great work, anywhere, on behalf of everyone. We started mapping this work, and we noticed some patterns – common ways of getting great work done together in a decentralised system.
There is an accompanying report explaining the thinking. Worth spending some time on.
Dave Richardson – From Awareness to Ownership: Our Cyber Journey Since 2023:
Since then, the landscape has only become more challenging. Cyber threats are more sophisticated, more frequent, and more impactful across local government, with real-world incidents disrupting services and eroding public trust.
At NSDC, we’ve responded by moving from improvement to embedded maturity – recognising that cyber security is not just an ICT issue but the whole organisation responsibility.
Tom Loosemore updates his classic definition of digital:
The digital revolution is still made of 1s and 0s, but plenty has happened in the decade since 2016. Eras are defined by what’s emergent; the big new thing that’s being folded into our lives. That was the internet. Today, it is the basket of technologies that comprise Artificial Intelligence, and what utility is unlocked by these new forms of intelligence, for the good or for ill of humanity.
Defining digital as being of the ‘internet era’ no longer feels quite right.
Tom has a much bigger brain than me, so shall defer to him, but my hunch is to give it a year or two before declaring this the “AI era”.
His closing point, though, is inarguable:
Today, it’s impossible to know exactly what this next era will be like. But it is perfectly possible for organisations to pick paths that make them better at responding to change, and to their user’s growing expectations, whatever form it takes. I’d start now.
DIgitalGov.news is now https://govfeed.digital/
Sigh.
All the old URLs should 301 to the new ones, including the mega RSS feed.
I have received a – to my eyes – absurd cease and desist request (with accompanying threat of “formal action”) from the owners of gov.news because they are worried my single vibe coded page of php digitalgov.news “creates a likelihood of confusion with our registered trademarks and established brand within the UK public sector market”.
My initial reaction is to blow a raspberry at it. Anyone have any sensible advice?
Thoughtful long read from Rachel Coldicutt:
Perhaps this collective hangover will be the thing that makes the AI bubble burst – or at least, start it rolling slowly off the peak of inflated expectations. Lord knows, there is no form of reason or economic sense behind the relentless game of Number Go Up being played by the rulers of our AI age: Huang, Bezos, Altman, Musk, and Amodei will keep cranking the money machine till everything explodes, and politicians will continue to run round at their behest. Instead, it seems likely that more of us will choose different things: WhatsApp will probably remain the default social operating system, but it seems likely we’ll see more atomisation for those of us who can choose, fewer common platforms, more pick and mix. But most importantly, it would be nice to see folks in the tech industry stop chasing their tails, desperately finding ways to apply new technologies to everything when sometimes the innovation we need is a little less technology and a little more of a personal touch.
James O’Malley takes a look at the National Data Library:
That’s why everyone from the Minister downwards is talking about what the platform ‘could’ do in the future – and, I assume, why the NDL programme was given £100m last year. That implies something more ambitious than an updated website.
And it’s possible to imagine plenty of futures for the NDL. Could it become the front door to Trusted Research Environments, that does let researchers poke around inside sensitive public sector data, a bit like the excellent OpenSafely?
Or could it become the gateway to government data not just for the human data nerds, but for the AI bots? One idea I particularly like is this proposal by the Open Data Institute, which pitches that the NDL’s job should be wrangling government data into a format so that AI agents, acting autonomously, can access public sector data. This will be particularly important in the future – as government data can provide valuable ground-truth information, that will make AI chatbots and agents more reliable.
And this brings me to what I think is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity with the NDL launch so far – and that’s the government not giving DSIT some form of enforcement power to oblige other government departments and public sector bodies to open up their data where they can, and set the standards for how it should be released.
The newly launched National Data Library features a really useful ‘Data manual’ – think service manual, but data – which I think lots of local councils will find helpful in developing their own data practice.
I have made a few updates to DigitalGovNews:
Check it out: https://digitalgov.news/