Thursday, 4 June, 2026

A digital standard for local government

The service standard has had a difficult time getting traction in local government, as a report from the LGA made clear – and this despite councils theoretically committing to it when they signed the digital declaration.

Local Government Digital StandardBut when Atika asked about ways of working to embed the digital principles of user-centricity, iterative delivery, and data-informed practice into the work her team does, I thought immediately of the standard. Or, more accurately, a standard – and one that could be used by not just Luton, but all councils.

So Atika commissioned me to produce a version of the service standard more suitable for local government usage, and over the last few months I have been picking away at it. At the end of May I had a bit of a breakthrough and finished a usable draft for comment. I presented the standard to the DDaT management team this afternoon and will be talking about it to the whole team on Monday.

The original 15 points of the series standard are now the 5 points of the Local Government Digital Standard. They are:

  1. Have you designed around fulfilling the needs of your users?
  2. Have you ensured what you have made is easy for everyone to use across all channels?
  3. Have you ensured your team has all the skills and perspectives required to do good work?
  4. Have you used the best technology available to meet the needs of all your users all of the time?
  5. Are there mechanisms and plans in place to review performance of your team’s work and improve it based on that data?

More important than the specific points though, I think, is the focus this standard has on learning and improvement, rather than on strict assessments and no/no-go decisions.

All the supporting guidance is grounded in the local government context, and the focus of the standard is always on how could we do this better next time?. It can be used with any piece of work, whether a simple online form, a full end to end digital service, or the rollout of a new piece of internal software.

There is currently a slidedeck that covers the detail of the points, with further guidance documents for each one too, as well as an example process for using the standard and a template for a checklist to use at the end of a piece of work.

It is still in draft form and am making tweaks based on feedback, and no doubt will make more once it has been tested in the real world. At that point, it will be published openly online so all councils can make use of it, if they choose to. My big thanks to Atika for encouraging that openness!

If you would like an early peak at the standard, just let me know.

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Steph Gray on how he leant into using AI tools on a recent web build:

It’s been the first project on which I’ve used significant amounts of AI support with the build. For me, for this kind of work, using Claude in particular has felt like working with 18v cordless power tools where previously I was using hand tools.

This feels right – the human is in charge, there’s no danger of the agent running off and doing mad things that can’t be fixed or supported in the future. Use the robot for the grunt work, and humans to bring the humanity.

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Wednesday, 3 June, 2026

Shelley Heckman shares an update on the Open Referral standard, and particularly the validator tool, on LinkedIn:

The Validator plays an important role across the wider ecosystem. It enables feed owners to check their own data, gives suppliers a way to test and demonstrate their platforms, and supports commissioners in embedding validation requirements into contracts. At the same time, it provides reassurance to data consumers that a feed is unlikely to cause issues when integrated into their services.

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Tuesday, 2 June, 2026

Am trialling Aeronaut – a nice, native desktop app for Bluesky on MacOS.

So far, so good.

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Doug Belshaw is doing something interesting with Substrate – a sort of public everything bucket as blog thing.

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Sunday, 31 May, 2026

Huh, this “using GenAI checklist” is pretty brutal, but thought-provoking:

By using GenAI:
☐ I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
☐ I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
☐ I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
☐ I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
☐ I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
☐ I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
☐ I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
☐ I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

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Friday, 29 May, 2026

Have added a ‘Hire me’ page to the blog, to remind people (and occasionally myself) what I do for a living! It’s at https://da.vebrig.gs/hire-me/

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Phil Rumens writes a thoughtful piece on the use of open source software in local government:

When open-source is discussed in the public sector, it is usually framed around transparency and reuse. The code behind products and tools built with public money is made open so that others can develop, adapt, and reuse it, and GDS recently published new guidance on this.

He makes a really good point about the breakout open source success of recent times – LocalGovDrupal:

Two factors are likely to have contributed to its success. First, Drupal itself is a mature product, originally released in 2001 and now on its eleventh major version, released in 2024, with older versions still supported. Second, it benefits from a large and active global community, with over a million members contributing to, maintaining, and supporting the platform.

It strikes me that this is where open source can have a much quicker impact, by taking existing projects that are proven to work at scale, and creating the themes, plugins or whatever is needed to make them fit the local government context – as opposed to starting from scratch.

That will necessarily mean focusing on software that supports ‘horizontal’ service areas that are common to organisations no matter what their sector, rather than specific verticals like housing, social care, or – dare I say it – planning. But there’s plenty to be getting on with in areas like ERP (ERPNext), CRM (SuiteCRM), workflow (Camunda) or document management (Alfresco). Or why not go all in and replace M365 stuff with Nextcloud?

How would this work? LocalGovDrupal offers the model:

  • Form a club of councils to agree what modifications need to be developed.
  • Pay into a fund (and hopefully attract some external funding).
  • Find helpful, friendly agencies who know the software to develop the necessary code for plugins, modules and whatever else is needed.
  • Encourage those agencies to create a market to support this software as it gets taken up across the sector.
  • Keep up a sector-agreed roadmap of improvements and maintenance work too keep the software fit for purpose.

There are savings here, but also improvements in user satisfaction and – I think potentially most impactful – reduced support overheads. It might help to create the headspace to start thinking about tackling those pesky vertical, service-specific applications.

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James Plunkett – Could the NHS leapfrog the rest on public sector digital work?:

I want to argue, however, for a more ambitious framing: that over the next five years, the NHS could leapfrog others in the public sector, and start to define what next generation public digital work looks like. I say this because the same things that have made the NHS tough terrain for digital work so far— the complexity of the environment and of the work itself, the decentralised nature of the system — now make it well-placed to become the frontier. This does not mean ignoring the basics. It means doing the basics in service of an ambitious vision; starting small, thinking big.

A loooooong read but definitely worth spending the time over (even if it is published on Medium, grrrrr).

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Made an update to DIgitalGovNews – adding a filter to the top so users can decide which feeds should appear on the page. Check it out: https://digitalgov.news/

Mostly added because my blog dominates it somewhat and people might want to find someone else’s posts!

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Thursday, 28 May, 2026

Today, I made DigitalGovNews – an aggregated stream of updates from sites mostly publishing about digital in government. You can find it at https://digitalgov.news/.

It’s very simple – just a single page of PHP and a stylesheet. It sucks in the RSS feeds from a number of sources and publishes them in one place.

It refreshes itself every 4 hours, and sticks a ‘New’ label on anything less than a day old.

My original aim was to try and make it easier for people to follow individual blogs about all things digital in government. Hopefully it does that, and is useful!

Am open to suggestions and feedback – just get in touch with any thoughts you have, including on additional sources to add.

The sites feeding DigitalGovNews at the moment are:

  • Catherine Howe
  • Dave Briggs (of course!)
  • Digital Newark and Sherwood
  • Essex Digital Service
  • GDS
  • LOTI
  • Luton DDaT
  • Matt Jukes
  • Richard Pope
  • Tom Loosemore
  • Will Callaghan

Please let me know what you think I should add!

(This list will be updated as sources get added and removed.)

Changelog

  • 3 June 2026 – added the ability to hide the intro paragraphs
  • 29 May 2026 – added a filter section so users can choose what feeds appear

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Wednesday, 27 May, 2026

Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald, quoted in The Verge:

We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount,” said Macdonald. “So if you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.

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I like the look of the Daylight DC–1 – it’s like a Remarkable e-ink tablet that also has a web browser on it. Using it with a keyboard for a distraction free writing tool looks neat too.

Bloody expensive though – think I will stick with my iPad mini for now!

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Giles Turnbull – Working in the open ≠ comms:

Comms seeks to bring about positive opinions of the work. Those opinions might be confined to a small group of relevant stakeholders, or they might be splashed across the pages of a newspaper. Either way: the goal is positive coverage and feedback. It’s a tool for leaders who want to show that they are making an impact.

Working in the open seeks to peel back the layers of organisational fluff that hide and obscure the work that’s being done. It encourages feedback, positive or otherwise. Working in the open happens with the implicit understanding that not all the feedback will be positive. It welcomes critique. It’s a tool for teams trying to share insights and progress, through the fog of institutional silos.

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Tuesday, 26 May, 2026

Am having some problems with the registration of my locali.se domain – which means the website isn’t working (no big deal really) but more annoyingly, emails to my @locali.se email address aren’t coming through.

If you want to email me, dave@sensibletech.co.uk is still working!

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Friday, 22 May, 2026

MHCLG have launched a £6m fund to support councils with delivering improvements following a cyber assessment framework.

We have launched a £6 million CAF Support Fund for 52 councils that have completed a CAF assessment, helping them accelerate improvements in key areas of cyber resilience and strengthen resilience across the sector.

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Following my online identity crisis, I’ve given the Localise website a rethink, and now it’s a much simpler one page affair that tells you what I do and how I do it.

Now I can focus on all the content creation activities I do on my own personal site and adjacent social networks etc.

The Localise site is at https://locali.se/ in case you are interested.

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Wednesday, 20 May, 2026

Some terrifying numbers in Ed Zitron’s post AI Is Too Expensive:

But LLMs are too expensive! They cost too much to run, and said costs appear to increase linearly with revenues. The more a user uses a product, the more it costs the company to run it, and the more capacity they can take up. The only way to capture any growth is to buy and install GPUs, which in turn requires you to build somewhere to put them, which takes time and money.

In effect, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are spending vast sums on computer power to service the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Those two companies are paying the bills through investment capital with no real route to profitability in sight.

What is almost certainly looks like is costs going up for end users through token based billing, which is likely to result in reduced usage of said tokens to make things affordable, which then means the whole pyramid collapses.

Be careful what you end up relying on, folks.

The whole article is full of quotable bits. Like this:

Any executive-level f*ckwit you’ve met in your life now has a seemingly-powerful tool that can burp up mimicry of open source software and, if you constantly prompt it, eventually get something half-functional onto some sort of web server. When you face bugs, it’ll try and fix them, sometimes also “fixing” (adding or deleting code) from elsewhere to be helpful, like when Cursor using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model deleted an entire production database and all its backups. It will never, ever say no, even if it’s incapable, even if it has no thoughts, even if what you are asking is equal parts impossible and unreasonable in both its timescale and scope.

Or this:

Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the f*ck they’re doing.

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I am LOVING Kev Rowe’s continued blogging about the low-code digital platform development at Luton, some of the thinking behind it, and how it ties in with the corporate strategy for the town:

… we’re building towards a more complete view of the resident. Starting with complaints, the aim is to give the contact centre better visibility so they can understand context and respond more effectively – but without the burden on the resident of having to create and maintain an ‘account’ with the council.

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