Daveslist Volume 4 Issue 1 🏠

A return after quite a long break!

Happy new(ish) year!

It’s been a while since I sent one of these, and I have to admit that the primary driver of sending this one is just to let you all know about an upcoming series of online events I’m doing with Carl.

I see you have toast.

It’s been a busy time, and the last month more than ever! We decided to move home on Christmas Eve - and it isn’t something we would recommend! Sausage sandwiches were a filling but not exactly festive Christmas dinner.

I need to have a think about this newsletter and whether I restart it as a regular thing or if I just use it now and then to highlight something specific. Any ideas you have, just let me know 🙂

Join The Change Makers!

My good friend Carl Haggerty and I are really pleased to be kicking off a new monthly thing – The Change Makers.

The first one is on Tuesday, 28th January 2025 at 11am and you can sign up for it now. We’ll be having a fairly open conversation about the broad topic of organisational change and our experiences of it.

Carl has recently started his own business – Relationships for Change – and I have been busy in the last few months rebranding what I do workwise, from SensibleTech to Localise. So it seems a good opportunity to bring our respective perspectives on change in local public services together.

We will be taking a change related topic every month, having a chat between ourselves and inviting all those who join us to offer their perspectives as well. We will flag up on our blogs what subjects we will be tackling each month, but it will always be something relating to change, and how the people and the digital elements can sometimes conflict, but can also combine well to create lasting, positive change.

We weren’t sure whether to do a podcast or a live online call, so we’ve decided to do both at the same time – a monthly online call that anyone can join and contribute to, that we record and publish afterwards.

If you would like to take part in the sessions, they are run on Zoom on the last Tuesday of every month at 11am for an hour. You can sign up for all the sessions on TicketTailor – slightly annoyingly, you have to do each one individually – but we promise it will be worth it!

To enable us to share useful things with those that join in or catch up with our discussions, we have also created a space on GovGroups which anyone can join. Just visit GovGroups, create your account, and then visit our Change Makers groupand join it!

We both look forward to seeing you there, and to grow our community of change makers in local public services!

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This issue’s links

• Denise Wilton writes One for all and all for none:

You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available.

• Ed Zitron:

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinkingto make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

• Dave Rogers answers the question Just what is ‘Test and Learn’?

• Anything that helps me (and others) understand Wardley Mapping better has to be a good thing. Here’s Will Larson’s Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

• The Foundations of Great Product and Service Design by Carrie Swatten (via Roger).

• Jeremy’s 5 reflections on his year at Homes England are interesting, wise, and definitely worth thinking over.

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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!

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️