Friday, 29 May, 2026

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

  • 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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Tuesday, 19 May, 2026

Monday, 18 May, 2026

We visited another National Trust place on Sunday – making decent use of our membership. Very middle class and age of course, but it gets me out of the house. This time we visited Peckover House in Wisbech, 15 minutes down the road. It was small but very interesting – fair bit of Quaker history there, which I find intriguing.

Anyhoo, having visited a few of these places now, here’s a suggestion. How about big stickers are offered to people as they enter, which say “I’m not a talker” on them or something, for people like me that like to wander about reading the information panels at my own pace, and who finds it absolutely toe-curling when well-meaning volunteers approach with their spiel?

That would then free up time for said volunteers to chat with folk like Mrs Briggs, who is more than happy to natter away and is far less grumpy than I.

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Apparently, the Bristol Mayor leads GovTech manifesto:

The manifesto, developed at the Govtech 4 Impact World Congress 2026 in Madrid, calls for a coordinated, market-shaping approach that positions cities and regions as active market shapers in the global GovTech industry. It focuses on interventions to accelerate the GovTech market, ensuring digital transformation supports societal challenges while safeguarding the public interest.

I have no idea what this means or if it matters.

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Friday, 15 May, 2026

Carl Haggerty shares his ‘year note’ about his first 12 months in post as Somerset Council’s Head of Transformation and Digital:

We haven’t fully broken the reflex that speed is the answer when pressure rises. We haven’t made learning feel consistently safe everywhere; blame and defensiveness still appear at times. We haven’t stabilised roles and handovers across the system enough to stop energy leaking through rework and uncertainty. We haven’t made “whole‑council” feel real in every interaction yet; transactional habits and silos still pull hard.

Buckle up for a long read – I think it must have taken at least 10 of those months to write this thing 😉

In all seriousness though, it’s full of honest reflection and worth spending time with to understand what it is like being in one of these jobs.

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One of the most interesting and exciting things about the LGR digital Playbook project is the vision for it to be as community-led and informed as possible.

The aim is to get as many people involved as we can, to ensure diversity of opinion, and to ensure that all perspectives are being considered and needs being met.

The best way to help us is to join the community. There’s no specific time commitment, you just get involved in activities as and when you can. But if you have any role to play in delivering LGR, it surely must be in your interest to sign up.

You can join the community using this form: https://bit.ly/playbookcommunitysignup

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Thursday, 14 May, 2026

New guidance published on GOV.UK – AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector:

User research suggests that the primary driver of exploitation risk is the presence of weaknesses in systems – including unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure implementation, and unsafe configuration or deployment – and the inability to remediate them quickly. Publishing source code does not create those weaknesses, but it can modestly reduce attacker uncertainty and speed up analysis (an effect that may increase with AI assistance), especially where maintenance is weak and fixes are slow. This guidance reinforces the minimum operational capability already assumed for safely operating publicly-accessible services.

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