An online notebook
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An online notebook
Richard Pope: Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services:
The principles of what makes a well-designed service remain the same as in the pre-AI digital era. AI should be treated as a design material rather than as a product in its own right. The goal of introducing AI into services should not be to create new “AI services”, but to make services work better for users.
Not come across LOTI’s service innovation cards before, but they are lovely and would be really interested to learn about how it plays out in a workshop setting.
It reminds me somewhat of the good old days of the social media and digital engagement games (that post is full of broken links, apologies, but I think you can get the drift) that David Wilcox, Steph Gray, and I used to run. I have often thought about what a digital transformation version might look like, and I suspect it isn’t a million miles away from what Eddie and the team have done here.
The Local Digital team at MHCLG is running a webinar to talk about the playbook we have been developing which guides digital teams through what they need to do during the creation of the new unitary councils.
It’s on April 29th at 10am and you can sign up on Eventbrite!
Interesting perspective on Ai generated software from Quentin Stafford-Fraser:
As we enter an era where software development is much cheaper and easier, the number of people able to create their own bespoke apps will increase rapidly. Either you’ll do it, or you’ll pay your neighbour’s son a modest amount to do it for you. Good and/or important software, to be used by large numbers of people, will still require experienced developers, though they may spend more time guiding the AI than actually typing the code. But software that is good enough for you to use yourself? That’s becoming a different story.
If I could get my head around how it is done, I could spend the rest of my days perfecting a native Mac app that combined my favourite features from Netnewswire, Marsedit, DEVONthink, Ulysses etc etc.
Cloudflare have released a new open source CMS, that they are billing as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress.
Unsurprisingly, Matt Mullenweg has views:
The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend vibecode project, but it has some of that smell.
I agree – having played with the sandbox version, it definitely feels like the result of someone typing “make me a wordpress clone” into Claude or something.
The team at Luton are experimenting in publishing project based week notes on their public blog.
Catherine Howe on her philosophical approach to working with AI models:
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to help people get started with AI. Not the technical side — there are plenty of people better placed than me for that — but the more fundamental question of how to approach it. What mindset do you bring? What’s the skill that unlocks it? I’m seeing people feel daunted, or underwhelmed, or frustrated, but as with most bits of new technology: the barrier isn’t usually the technology. I’m finding this even more the case with AI.
As I’ve started experimenting myself I’ve actually gone back to skills I learnt in my undergraduate degree and I’m coming to think the skill we need isn’t computer science or data literacy or anything obviously modern. It’s philosophy.
Following the announcements last week of the shape of local government arrangements in various areas, I’ve had to rethink things a bit. The move is clearly towards merging and empowering districts over centralising into unitary counties.
This means an increase in disaggregation. Take the county I reside in, Norfolk, as an example: it is being split into 3 unitaries, which means that services currently delivered by the county (social care, education, highways etc) will in future sit with the new unitaries. Thus these services – with their people, processes, and technology, will need to be split into three. In Essex, they will be split into 5!
This can, though, be made a lot simpler if the councils involved decide to continue to work closely together in the future. On the tech side, this could mean keeping the county digital services as they are – either for a period of time or in perpetuity – as a properly constituted shared service.
LGR does not mean that the new councils can’t share services, capabilities, people or assets. Given the huge amount of change that LGR entails, it might well make sense in some cases for things to be left as they are for a while, because they work as they are, and can be returned to when the dust settles elsewhere.
There’s a danger that if folk get too focused on separation, opportunities to reduce the levels of change, and therefore risk, are missed. It might well be that there are things which aren’t broken and don’t need to be fixed.
Alan Wright’s Definitions of Done Checklist.
Will Callaghan shares A new flatpack collaborative model for the public sector:
The goal was to identify a ‘flatpack model’ which would make collaboration as easy as going it alone. There are currently 317 councils in England still building or buying almost everything alone. It’s a waste of time and money, and a missed opportunity.
I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.
A new entry in the Digital LGR Playbook has been published: Disaggregating services and data.
Feels like, following the announcements last week, that we will need to write a lot more on disaggregation as it seems like single-unitary counties are not going to be the thing.
When Nick and I started planning LGRCamp, we knew we wanted the audience to be local government folk only – plus a smattering of other bits of the public sector who have an interest. Of course there are suppliers who want to be in the room, but for a first event of this kind, there needs to be separation between the community and the commercials, to build trust. So, suppliers can come along, but they have to pony up to support the event, and they have to play by the rules.
That hasn’t stopped several commercial enterprises registering anyway, and It amuses me greatly to see them describing themselves as “other public sector” or “non-profit” or even as a council to try and slip through the net.
I’m all for building bridges between the buyers and sellers of digital products and services in the sector, but seriously, this is not helpful.
Really nice in depth case study looking at how Milton Keynes City Council transformed their planning services, using Arcus Global’s tech:
Legacy back-office systems are holding many planning departments back—slowing processes, frustrating staff, and limiting the ability to deliver efficient, modern services for our communities. Replacing them is no small task; for most councils, it feels like a mountain to climb. But it can be done. This case study shows how Milton Keynes City Council took on the challenge, navigated the risks, and is transforming its planning service with a new cloud-based platform. It is proof that while digital transformation is hard, it is not impossible.
Richard Pope – Unified inboxes, streams and augmentation:
The idea of a unified inbox for government is not a new one. Many governments around the world have developed one, as have public organisations like the National Health Service in England, which has a unified inbox for patients. Many commercial services, like banks, have them too.
Rather than seeing unified inboxes as a desirable end state, I argue that we should see them as a staging post to something else and a tool to further unbundle services. And that, long-term, we will come to see them as representing a missed opportunity.
Giles Turnbull points to Signboard, a kanban board app that saves data in plain text files. Neat!
Colin Stenning has updated his survey of what content management systems are used across local government – this time, with maps!
New resource added to the digital LGR playbook by the team – Cyber readiness.
Ensuring a new unitary council can protect data, detect threats, maintain secure access, and keep critical services running from day one.
Terence Eden – How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?:
When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced.