📅 Daily Note: October 21, 2025

Sarah and Carl are taking up the reigns of LocalGovDigital – a Slack-based networks of digital practitioners in local government, and I’m stepping down.

I think they’ll do a great job and am really excited about what they will be able to achieve with the group – hopefully a lot more than I managed!

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I linked to the recent Notify case study on LinkedIn, adding the commentary below. Saving here for posterity 🙂

Feels to me like this ought to be something easily adopted in local government. I did some digging into Notify uptake in local gov a year or so ago, and found that many councils use Notify for one or two things, but it was rarely considered a core component of digital service delivery. Why? Because sending SMS notifications isn’t part of many workflows. Often because it was seen as too expensive when looked at 10 or 15 years ago.

Encouraging councils to send more SMS notifications is the start, because leveraging Notify to do it is an absolute no-brainer.

(Am aware that Notify does more than SMS, but you hopefully get my point.)

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James Plunkett writes Iterate, if you can:

Because linear mentalities have crept back in some places, it would be worth a big new push to restate the basic case for iterative and user-centred methods, and to insist on the associated operating model (e.g. mixed discipline teams). Clarity is key: assert the basic principles of iterative working, explain why it reduces risk and makes better use of public money, be insistent on the model, etc. Test & Learn might be the best framing/vehicle for this, but it will need strong support from the highest levels of government if contemporary management practices and operating models are to become non-negotiable.

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I need to get better at remembering to hit the publish button on the daily note aggregation posts on here. I don’t want to automate it and like having some control, so maybe a calendar entry is the right way to go!

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Nova Constable writes about accessibility and LocalGovDrupal on the Digital Luton blog.

This blog is hosted on localgov.blog – a WordPress instance I host to enable councils to operate ad-free blogs without having to suffer adverts or deal with the hosting issues themselves. Just let me know if you would like one for your council!

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📅 Daily Note: October 16, 2025

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Lloyd reports not getting a pingback from me when I linked to his blog. Am not surprised the micropost didn’t ping, but the daily note aggregated version is just a standard post and should have done. Will take a look into it.

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Scaling Digital Infrastructure in a Siloed State: How the UK government designed and financed GOV.UK Notify to prioritise achieving universal public sector adoption:

In 2015, UK government call centres received hundreds of millions of calls about its 7,000+ government services. One in four of these calls was a request for an update on an application or appointment. This drove up call volumes, increased hold times, and was often a source of negative interaction between the public and the government. Worse, they cost the government millions of pounds.

Could the UK government develop a method to deliver trustworthy, accessible information quickly and securely across fragmented industries? What strategies could they use to create universal adoption? And perhaps most challenging: who would pay for it in a government structured around departmental silos? In this case study, we explore how the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) addressed a government-wide challenge by developing a modular digital infrastructure, focusing on how the team evaluated and made key decisions around scaling and financing a cross-government service. In doing so, we highlight the strategic choices and pivotal moments that shaped its success.

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📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025

I newslettered earlier.

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i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging.

I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily basis (or when I remember to hit the switch). Each of these ‘microposts’ exists as a separate item in the database, so you could see them all in one place, or even subscribe to the RSS feed for them. Massive thanks again to Steph for making this magic work for me.

I am aware that it’s very link-heavy, and I don’t write much here other than pointing to other people’s stuff. I’d like to write more and reading Lloyd’s stuff has been encouraging!

All this is possible because of open platforms like WordPress and standards like RSS. I don’t really understand what the ‘fediverse’ is, really, but it strikes me that there are two simple things that people need: somewhere to write, and somewhere to read.

I wonder if thing that blogging lacks is what we get with a lot of the walled gardens, which is the that the reading and the writing is in the same place. People like me are happy finding one service to subscribe to blogs in, and another to write posts in. But should WordPress (say) have an inbuilt aggregator? After all, we don’t read and write emails in different apps.

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This blog now has a ‘dark mode’ option – there should be a moon shaped button floating around somewhere on the screen that lets you toggle between the default, rather bright, style; and a much darker, easier on the eyes one.

Very easy to do thanks this WordPress plugin.

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Not come across Digital and Data essentials for senior civil servants before, but it looks a sensible list, and one that could be easily adapted for local government use.

Perhaps as a Skillstats thing? 🤔

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Our daughter Jade took a photo of me to start using on the internet – replacing the rather catfishy one where I have hair and look hopeful. Have spent part of the day updating various accounts and web pages with it.

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Great stuff from Emily Webber on ice breakers.

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📅 Daily Note: October 6, 2025

A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw:

Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and academic integrity – with some organisations establishing centralized AI task forces while others maintain department-led initiatives that risk duplication and inconsistent policies.

Given this landscape, strategic engagement with AI requires drawing on experiences from across the sector and beyond. This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing the different aspects of AI implementation. Here we present two complementary frameworks – EVR’s 4D strategy and dxw’s iterative approach to grounded experimentation – that together provide a comprehensive roadmap for successful AI implementation in higher education.

Useful for any sector.

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Via Neilly, Project vs Product Funding by Jennifer Pahlka:

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Scott Colfer writes Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One (and Why That Matters for Product People)

In government and the wider public sector, we’ve built our identity around “services.”
Digital teams design them, measure them, apply the Service Standard to them.

But most of what we call a service isn’t actually a service.

More often, the work we label as a “service” is really something else:

  • An experience (like applying, enrolling, or updating).
  • A capability (like payments, case management, or publishing).
  • Or a technology system (like a website or platform).

The Service Standard itself, our flagship guidance, is rarely been applied to a true end-to-end service. Most of the time, it’s applied to fragments: experiences, capabilities, or tech.

And that mislabelling matters. You can end up treating a website like a whole service, or expecting a tech platform to deliver a citizen journey.

 

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Interesting take: hands up people who’ve ever said “i cant wait for my local council to build an AI chatbot”

do residents actually want this?

wouldn’t they rather use their chosen AI – which already has access to and understands the internet, their preferences, their context? instead of our RAG bot that knows nothing about them and only works within our little bubble?

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OpenReferralUK show and tell. I wrote on LinkedIn about it:

I genuinely believe there is a golden opportunity in the open referral stuff to use the service directory concept to flip the local public service operating model to matching people’s needs with those that can meet with – with local government getting out of the way.

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📅 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 banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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