Daveslist Volume 3 Issue 10 🙏

Simple things people in charge need to remember

Hallo there!

No newsletters last week as I took a week off working. Very nice it was too! Stayed home but went out on various trips, including Tattershall Farm Park, where we met this guy:

A meerkat, spotted last week

Commenting on James Herbert’s sensible post about approaching AI in local government, I came up with 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious that all senior people ought to have in their minds whenever technology is being discussed.

• If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one (and please don’t try to turn it into one either!*)

• You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations

• There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan

• There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic

• Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

Increasingly, I tend to speak about digital being different from previous approaches to technology because it includes a healthy dose of cynicism about the ability of technology to improve anything, ever. Perhaps these points reflect that!

* this rather excellent addition thanks to Sarah Peña.

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This issue’s links

WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).

What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”

“Microsolidarity is a community-building practice” - this is extremely useful - thanks to Lloyd Davis for writing about it.

Setting the ambition for Future Councils – been looking forward to seeing some outcomes from this work. Will write up my thoughts once I have had a proper mull.

Text of Bill Thompson’s recent ‘state of the net’ style talk – “The network and its many applications have had a massive impact on our lives, but the tools they gave us were unable to resist the incursions of predatory capitalism or hold back the worst excesses of human toxicity and hatred.”

Fab work by Tewkesbury Council, going live with their new – WordPress powered – website (I ❤️ WordPress).

“Catching up on the weird world of LLMs“. Great resource from Simon Willison.

Alan Wright’s blog is chock full of brilliantly useful articles, like this one on splitting product teams. Go read them all!

Not a ‘digital’ thing, but I have been very much enjoying the ‘These Times’ podcast, from UnHerd. It’s really good!

Watch this and be as confused as I was:

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That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️