Saturday, 18 April, 2026

Like most people, I don’t often need to interact with my local council, and so – given the way I make a living – I tend to take notice when I do.

Recently we got an email with an invoice on it from the council to renew our garden waste bin subscription. I remember that when I ordered it originally I had open an account on the council website, so I went to log into that to process the renewal.

Of course, having clicked to login to my account, I was then asked which my account I wanted – the one for council tax or the one for everything else. I chose everything else and once I had reset my password, logged in.

On logging in, the only thing I could do was order another garden waste bin. My account did not know that I had one.

Instead, to pay the invoice, I had to leave the my account section, go to ‘make a payment’ and enter the details (account number, invoice number, my address, even my email address) from the invoice manually to pay by card.

To avoid this in future, I would need to phone the council – no options to set up a garden waste direct debit online, whether on my account or not.

Just this simple, highly transactional, example shows how far we still have to go. This isn’t a complex service like social care or SEND or housing. Despite having the technology for an account, doing simple things with it are still not possible.

It’s pretty pathetic.

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Friday, 17 April, 2026

The National Digital Exchange is a really neat idea that is looking more and more impressive.

Basically, it’s a way to try out local government software – often open source – without needing to buy it first or run costly proof of concept projects.

Effectively, you choose a tool and then it is automagically spun up for you in a temporary bit of Amazon cloud.

Some of the tools available to try include:

  • LocalGovDrupal
  • Back Office Planning System
  • FixMyStreet
  • LocalGov Income Management System
  • Simply Readable (AI-powered document translation)

It’s a brilliant idea and a great way to showcase open source solutions for the sector.

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Thursday, 16 April, 2026

Will Callaghan is on a bit of a blogging roll at the moment. Here he is on Kickstarting collaboration during LGR:

Of the speakers, the stand out two for me were Kate Hurr and Madeline Hoskin, of Cumberland and North Yorkshire Councils respectively. They’ve both been through LGR relatively recently, and shared practical hard won advice.

Both argue that councils need to collaborate more, particularly through LGR. We’re all meeting the same needs, there’s very little about our organisations that is unique. I totally agree. The questions for me are: what barriers exist to collaboration over the next few years, and how can we remove them?

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Wednesday, 15 April, 2026

I had the thought the other day that an awful lot of time gets wasted in local government digital because of the constant cycle of probably unnecessary change.

Here’s an example: new chief digital person comes in, and the first thing they want to do is to impose themselves, so new strategy, often new tech, new approaches and ways of working etc.

Now obviously everyone feels justified in doing this. Frankly, if I were to get a new job running digital in a council, it’s the first thing I would do!

But it is usually a waste of time. I heard the other day about a council who have brought in a new interim CDO type person and the first thing they are doing is to get rid of one digital platform to replace it with another. It just so happens to be the one that was previously canned to make way for the current one!

Put like that, it seems very silly, and a lot of work and time for no real obvious improvement. After all, a team might spend 18 months or 2 years migrating from one platform to another, to be in basically the same position as before, only on different tech.

Trying to put a stop to it, though, is really challenging. Perhaps this is, again, an argument for a bit less local autonomy in individual councils when it comes to choosing technology. If all the time, energy and money spent on cycling through different options every 5 years was instead invested in improving shared platforms, we probably would make a lot more progress.

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Tuesday, 14 April, 2026

GDS Local have published the first iteration of their architecture for (digital) local government.

It looks at this stage like very high level, simplified enterprise architecture.

It will be interesting to see where it goes next. I worry about architecture being done for its own sake, and so understanding what the outcome this will help achieve is going to be key.

Phil’s accompanying blog post helps with some of that:

It makes it easier to describe applications, integrations, data and underlying capabilities, regardless of which products are in use. That supports clearer conversations with suppliers, internal governance groups, and central government. It also makes dependencies and risks easier to see.

For me there are two pragmatic outcomes that make sense here.

One develops the shared language thing further, translating between technology design and service design, so conversations can be had by both sides with everyone understanding what the others are referring to.

I think that probably lies in connecting this kind of technology architecture with service patterns, such as those being worked on in Wales.

Secondly, I wonder if the nailing down of a common language and definitions of what digital gubbins councils need to deliver their services might lead to interesting conversations about the delivery of that gubbins, and where capacity could be created in the sector by sharing a lot of the stuff that doesn’t really matter to most people. More on that in this post from ages ago.

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Am super impressed with the way Doug is using AI tools to help him build useful software. Commonplace is a way of saving online stuff into collections. It’s a bit like Delicious of old.

What’s more, browsing through the collections others have created, I have already found a few useful things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise: Heynote, a simple ‘scratchpad’ style text editor; and Joplin, an open source everything-bucket like Evernote or my current choice DEVONthink.

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Monday, 13 April, 2026

I sent out a newsletter for the first time in ages today. It’s a simple dump of the last week’s blog posts from here.

Since I put in place the Jetopack-driven email subscription feature, precisely one person signed up, so it didn’t feel like the right way to do things. I’ll be disabling that shortly.

For some reason, people like a proper newsletter! I have a decent enough list of email addresses on the old Daveslist newsletter, which I used for this new blog based format. Will see what people make of it!

If you aren’t signed up, you can do so.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Friday, 10 April, 2026

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.

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Thursday, 9 April, 2026

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.

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Wednesday, 8 April, 2026

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.

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Thursday, 2 April, 2026

Disaggregation doesn’t have to mean total separation!

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.

#Disaggregation doesn’t have to mean total separation!

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.

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Tuesday, 31 March, 2026

Giles Turnbull on AI:

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.

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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.

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