Kind of Digital

Dave — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:47:19 +0000

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.

Dave — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:31:06 +0000

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?

Dave — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:02:35 +0000

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.

Dave — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:20:51 +0000

Really good post from Kev Rowe on the Luton blog about how the team are preparing for the rollout of the new Netcall low code platform. Lots of learning of lessons from previous experience as well as tapping into the expertise from other councils. Love it.

Dave — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:14:36 +0000

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.

Dave — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:19:13 +0000

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.

Dave — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:38:11 +0000

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.

Dave — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:08:14 +0000

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.

Dave — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:51:12 +0000

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.

Dave — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:18:12 +0000

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!