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My battle with GoDaddy customer support continues over my borked locali.se domain. In the meantime, dave@sensibletech.co.uk will still reach me 😩
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Friday, 5 June, 2026
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Matt Hill-Wood – Co-designing digital planning products at scale:
Certain principles were clear:
- Councils, particularly the people closest to the ‘frontline’ of planning services, need to be as close to product decisions as possible
- Decisions must be informed by voices from a range of councils, so that the outputs work in a variety of contexts
- Central government should tread lightly in order to create genuine and sustainable partnerships by ensuring council teams have agency at all times.
This looks like an important read – the first from from the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government:
Our inquiry identified four building blocks for successful digital transformation, and four barriers to realising its benefits. The building blocks are:
- Money: Money is undoubtedly being spent on digital initiatives but inadequate data on digital spend prevents the government from making informed decisions or holding those responsible to account.
- People: The public sector needs more of the right people to deliver digital transformation of the state, and cultural change to ensure skills are valued and embedded in leadership levels.
- Information and data security: The current government is not holding itself to the standards of information security needed to secure public trust, or to prevent massive data breaches from happening again.
- Delivery: The government has a vision but needs a plan to deliver it. There is still time to turn things around but without a detailed, measurable plan, this digital transformation agenda may not succeed.
Jason Snell on the proliferation of vibe-coded Mac apps, and his experience of making one himself:
The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only one part of a much larger process. Great developers aren’t necessarily great coders, though they can be. Apps must be envisioned, their specifications defined. The act of trying to describe an app to an AI coding engine is a clarifying one. The more you describe the app, the harder your brain has to work, because it’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The decisions you make determine what the app comes to be. It’s authorship of a sort, but defined in a way that takes the writing of code out of the equation, which is weird, since the act of coding has usually been an inextricable part of the process of making software.
Good, thoughtful stuff from Steve Messer in his latest week note:
My main hypothesis is that the existing set of products, platforms and enabling services was not built for a joined-up, personalised paradigm. Service teams are attempting to better meet the needs of patients and users in that more joined-up world, but what’s available to them doesn’t help in an ideal way…
Alongside this, there’s the tendency to want to solve common problems with big platforms. This is an organisational want – it doesn’t come from the teams. But big platforms that solve many needs take a long time to research, architect and build. By the time it’s ready, the need hasn’t been met, expectations have changed, and it’s time to think about a new big platform.
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.
But 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:
- Have you designed around fulfilling the needs of your users?
- Have you ensured what you have made is easy for everyone to use across all channels?
- Have you ensured your team has all the skills and perspectives required to do good work?
- Have you used the best technology available to meet the needs of all your users all of the time?
- 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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 June, 2026
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.
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/
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.
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).
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!
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
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.
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!
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.
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!