Dave Briggs' other blog

AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI. # – micropost 22995 Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”. # – micropost 22996 Ben Unsworth is blogging! # – micropost 22997 Service mapping: building transparency, trust and transformation together on the ... Keep reading

I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster: Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I ... Keep reading

Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it? It seems like vendors are keen to say they have user groups, but then once the sale is made, less keen on convening ... Keep reading

Ben Welby: Pocket, Pavement, Platform: Government in the App Store and on the High Street # – micropost 22969 Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as vital skills for leadership # – micropost 22970 Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing ... Keep reading

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service. # – micropost 22965 Ben Holliday: New ways of organising: What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard to point to places that we can truly call service organisations, at least outside of ... Keep reading

“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway. ‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue with when uttered with confidence. But just the slightest digging under the surface reveals a ... Keep reading

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”. In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by ... Keep reading

For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis. There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability at writing WordPress code. The result is Content Restrictor – and it works very nicely ... Keep reading

Chatting with Clare this morning about all things digital and local government reorganisation, I came to the conclusion that it really is all a balancing act. The risks of things going wrong are huge, and the importance of being ‘safe and legal’ is vital… but at the same time this is a generational opportunity for ... Keep reading

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working. # – micropost 22920 Some interesting notes on the issues around the software market for local government. # – micropost 22934 My general take these days is that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably ... Keep reading

I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I couldn’t access my computer! Now, wellness gurus would probably be yelling “GOOD!” at me at ... Keep reading

Nice, insightful set of principles around how Martin Wright writes his weeknotes: I write about what’s stuck with me when I sit down to write my weeknote. I don’t want to assume what’s important, or interesting enough to weeknote while it’s happening, so I don’t take notes during the week to feature in my weeknote. ... Keep reading

Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good. In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes ... Keep reading

It’s been nearly 6 months since I last posted here, and I have been really quiet on the likes of LinkedIn and Bluesky too. If I am honest doesn’t feel like months, this year has just raced past. What’s been keeping me busy is a whole range of things, the big one being we moved ... Keep reading