The Broad Bean

The previous weeknote was all about the need for a community of teams to change the experience of the NHS App collect...

Dave Richardson – From Awareness to Ownership: Our Cyber Journey Since 2023: Since then, the landscape has only becom...

Tom Loosemore updates his classic definition of digital: The digital revolution is still made of 1s and 0s, but plent...

From Awareness to Ownership: Our Cyber Journey Since 2023

In 2023, I wrote about how local government can lead the way in cyber security – drawing on Newark and Sherwood Distr...

DIgitalGov.news is now https://govfeed.digital/ Sigh. All the old URLs should 301 to the new ones, including the mega...

June(sie) 02

If you are still with me after the last couple of sad sack notes you’ll be pleased to know I am in a slightly better ...

I have received a – to my eyes – absurd cease and desist request (with accompanying threat of “formal action”) from t...

Thoughtful long read from Rachel Coldicutt: Perhaps this collective hangover will be the thing that makes the AI bubb...

James O’Malley takes a look at the National Data Library: That’s why everyone from the Minister downwards is talking ...

The newly launched National Data Library features a really useful ‘Data manual’ – think service manual, but data – wh...

What we learned from the Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars programme – and how it is shaping the next phase 

Find out how the first 10 months of the AI Exemplars programme has gone.

How to THRIVE in Luton

If THRIVE means Training, Health, Resilience, Inclusion, Vitality and Empowerment, then there’s a new hub to help! O...

Weeknotes w/e 5 June 2026

Updates from DDaT projects including OneDrive user adoption, frontline services, regulatory services, data governance...

Bringing DDaT teams together: highlights from our June Quarterly Connect

In addition to our DDaT away days, the whole of Luton's DDaT service gets together in person for our Quarterly Connec...

Show and Tell: AI categorisation and distribution of shared mailbox email

In our latest Intelligent Automation team Show and Tell, Ian walked through something most teams will recognise strai...

The Base Comes First

This week was good. Frankie joined us along with Jamie. We got the chance to hang out in a team day. We got a better ...

LGRcamping

Local gov camp parked its bus at Newark during May to deliver an interactive and insightful day to all that attended....

Sprint 3: Luton’s digital platform

In my last post, I wrote about how our new digital platform supports our Luton 2040 vision and why it matters. This u...

June(sie) 01 

🚨🚨Warning🚨🚨 I’m still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I can’t seem to shake it at the moment. Physically, mentall...

Data maturity: the foundation for AI ready public sector data

Good AI starts with good data. We partnered with The National Archives to explore how data maturity can prepare legal...

Supporting the Unreasonable Customer Policy

Helping the Complaints team apply the Unreasonable Customer Conduct (UCP) policy consistently and manage cases clearly.

Building for the future: Making change simple on GOV.UK Pay 

GOV.UK Pay has a new provider for non-Crown card payments and pay by bank. Find out what this means for public sector...

The Curry House Storm

Last week was the end of my second full working week on the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services...

May Days [04]

The cognitive dance I am doing day in, day out continues to be pretty exhausting.  Am I fatigued because of the heat ...

Putting customers first:  DVLA and  CustomerFirst  partnering to improve Drivers Medical service

CustomerFirst, a new unit in the Government Digital Service, is working with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency ...

Elderflower lemonade

Speculating into the future by design

Genta from the LOTI team discusses using speculative design methodology to explore the London Health Mission. The po...

The cost of building fell…but the cost of deciding hasn’t

Dwain Nicely, Continuous Innovation Manager at Barking and Dagenham, shares his thoughts on the cost of deciding in l...

The Bach Wen

Last week was the end of my first full working week on the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services ...

Small actions, shared value — Seocho Coin

Polly from the LOTI Team sits down with Seocho-gu, South Korea to discuss their innovative Seocho Coin initiative and...

Are your role profiles a problem?

Alison from the LOTI Team shares some tips on how to modernise your role profile and attract a wider pool of talent. ...

Legacy technology Inertia: Why things don’t change

Sarbjit from the LOTI Team examines systematic and non-technical forces contributing to legacy technology inertia and...

Weeknotes w/c 26 May 2026

Skills, work experience and graduates were a focus for our director this week, along with potential plans for a mayor...

AI = Ain’t Inclined

Originally I titled this post ‘AI = Not Interested’ but I realised that is not really my state of mind. I am somewhat...

May Days [03] 

I’ve been back at work for 10 days and today should have been my 100th (working) day in this role. I actually think I...

Co-designing better housing services

How we brought content, service design and housing expertise together to create a simpler, more joined-up experience ...

What have drawings of peas got to do with prototyping digital services? www.platformland.xyz/ways-of-d…

Building a platform that supports Luton 2040

Find out how our new digital platform supports our Luton 2040 vision - that Luton will be a healthy, fair and sustain...

Co-designing digital planning products at scale

MHCLG’s Digital Planning Programme has championed a new approach to public sector technology development. We put the ...

Weeknotes 18 May 2026

Another week of exciting updates for DDaT Luton, from a bid to be the UK's first Civica AI infrastructure site to mor...

100 novels (of limited literary value)

My inevitable response to The Guardian’s click-bait list is this list of a randomised 100 novels I have purchased onl...

Succession

With 25 emails left until I reach 500 the end is nigh for the Internet of Public Service Jobs newsletter. Even before...

May Days [02]

Second week back – first attempt at my new 22.5 hour ‘week’. Honestly it is going to take a bit of getting used to. T...

The Pembroke Dock

New week, new work. This week I joined the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services at NHS England....

Answers in seconds, 24/7: GOV.UK Chat launches in the GOV.UK app

Find the information you need, quickly and easily, through the AI-powered chat system for GOV.UK.

Why it’s important to thinking of public sector super apps from the viewpoint of ‘the system’, not just ‘the citizen’...

Lobster pots, complexity and starting small in the right way Or the case against use-cases https://www.platformland.x...

I can’t tell isn’t was just a late 80s early 90s blip (or age induced nostalgia), but it seemed when I was younger qu...

Elections and the Community Fund

I’ve mentioned the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund a few times now, so here’s more info on how it works and what we’ve...

[What is it you actually do?] 10 years later

A decade ago this month I started a series called ‘What is it you actually do?’ Blogpost ‘interviews’ that asked inte...

May days [01] – back in an office chair and Camp(Digital)ing 

So after six weeks of ‘fit’ notes and various health shenanigans that came close to closing the book on your author I...

End of Sprint 1: bringing Liberty Create to life for Luton’s CRM and digital services

A month ago, we were laying the rails by agreeing patterns, shaping standards, and getting ready for delivery. Now th...

In 2018 (ish) at Harvard Kennedy School I saw a talk about cyber (my poor filing system means I can’t find the notes)...

Weeknotes 5 May 2026

Awesome overall customer satisfaction score of 94.44% in April!! Plus weeknotes from our director and all DDaT projec...

Putting in place the enabling conditions for AI

Eddie Copeland explores what conditions and behaviours councils need to cultivate in order to achieve value from usin...

Discussing Practical AI for Projects

In March, I had the pleasure of attending one of my favourite conferences – Housing Technology. A notable development...

Popped in to see Larry

Testing a different way to improve complex public services

Read to find out about how the CustomerFirst Team is exploring NewCo as a way of working.

How DDAT supports inspections through DUCKS

When a Children’s Ofsted inspection lands, the pressure is immediate. While frontline practice takes centre stage, th...

GOV.UK One Login for HMRC: how we made it happen and what comes next

Find out how GDS and HMRC joined forces to bring GOV.UK One Login to millions and what comes next for simpler access ...

Given generative AI is all about predicting next words, when do I get a better spell check!? (I regularly have to Goo...

Good thoughts from @edent.tel on closing open-source repos because Mythos: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/does-myth...

Marty Cagan’s ‘new standard’ for Product in the age of AI

Yesterday I joined a talk by Marty Cagan on the ‘new standard’ for product management in the age of AI. Marty’s main ...

Reflecting on VIPER and looking at future phases

In the last few days I’ve seen some encouraging posts about collaboration and sharing across local government, and Wi...

Keep coming back to this video in the context of AI-based public services: [www.youtube.com/watch If mentalizing / ep...

Solving local government issues through collaboration with external digital talent in Tokyo

GovTechTokyo shares their experience in collaborating with external digital talent on large scale projects such as di...

Is your job ad accidentally ghosting your best candidates?

Alison from the LOTI team shares tips on how to make your digital, data, and technology (DDaT) professional job ad st...

The Palintir mini manifesto at least makes it clear that if you buy their software you are buying it to a transnation...

End of week 1 Digital placement for Carlisle College T Level Students

Over the last two days, the Digital team has hosted nine T Level students from Carlisle College, marking the end of t...

Making a socially transformative impact in Tohoku, Japan  

How does social impact and economic value go hand in hand? Yuma Kawahara from Sendai City shares their work on suppor...

What drives risk-averse procurement?

Radical thinking doesn’t happen unless the culture in a borough can support it. Sarbjit from the LOTI team discusses ...

Playing with open weight LLMs.

Checking back in on the state of open weight LLMs after a couple of months away and the best are much better than in ...

Kickstarting collaboration during LGR

Earlier this month I attended LGR Camp in London, a get together of councils and suppliers who’re going through Local...

Three activities to sharpen up your team’s influencing skills

One of the challenges of working in a central or a networked organisation is that you often don’t have direct control...

Having a gander at Goose

Today I’ve been having a play with Goose, a new AI agent that you can run on your local machine. No subscriptions, h...

GDS Local: building the foundations for digital collaboration

GDS Local shares the latest developments on how the initiative is supporting digital transformation in councils.

This is beginning to feel like an inevitability: Davey says war bonds would help to speed up UK defence spending

Kingsdown, Kent

Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services… https://www.platformland.xyz/ways-of-doing/stop-searching...

The Dangers

This will be the last weeknote of this series (series 21!) which started last summer. I’ve finished up at MHCLG and S...

From Front Rooms to Future Tools: Exploring AI Transcription and Summarisation in Social Work Practice

From Front Rooms to Future Tools: Exploring AI Transcription and Summarisation in Social Work Practice Bianca Cole Fr...

How to have a whip round

For international readers, a whip round is “an informal British phrase for collecting money from a group of people, o...

It’s all about the question

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to help people get started with AI. Not the technical side — there are pl...

A new flatpack collaborative model for the public sector

Following on from my post about software partnerships, I wanted to share a few findings from work finished late last ...

CustomerFirst: how we’re transforming services together

CustomerFirst is a new unit in GDS, set up to explore fresh ways of working in government and modernise public servic...

Scaling Innovation: The Role of the Proactive Funder

Grant funding is a big lever to intervene in any system. Teams that run funding processes - in government or outside ...

At the British Academy for a day long policy lab Noted on the way in: the dedicated Champaign cork recycling box

Celebrating London’s digital inclusion changemakers: Melissa, Founder of Bridge the Gap

Good Things Foundation spoke with Melissa Francis, the CEO and founder of Bridge the Gap Ending Digital Poverty C.I.C...

A day in the life as…a Data Scientist

Sean Pedrick-Case shares what it is like to work as a Data Scientist at the London Borough of Lambeth.  The post A da...

Positioning AI https://www.rpp.works/ways-of-doing/positioning-ai/

The Springtime Sun

Last week was my penultimate week on planning.data.gov.uk, meaning there were a bunch of loose ends tied up. But ther...

Introducing ‘software partnerships’

NEW: Entries for VIPER and Society Works Collaboration is so hot right now. In almost 20 years in the public sector, ...

Introducing OverBanded.com, a total nonsense made with AI

I got the Eurostar back from Paris yesterday. So I made a new thing. This time I’ve combined data from the excellent ...

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