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Didn’t venture too far, just an hour and a bit down the round to the North Norfolk coast, mostly Sheringham, bit of Cromer (prefer Sheringham).

Was a proper break, barely looked at my phone. Managed to get some reading done too – have been in a real slump of late on that front, and managed to read Straight Man by Richard Russo (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) and Therapy by David Lodge (⭐️⭐️⭐️).

Being by the sea meant we could enjoy the hot weather – when we got back home, inland, the heat really hit us!

Can see myself using it a lot from now on!

When I first joined local government 23 years ago, I could never have imagined that one day I would become an assistant director of technology and infrastructure. Like many careers in public service, mine did not follow a carefully planned route.

A great read and a fantastic example for anyone just starting out in their career.

A productivity tool from LOTI, for any organisation to deploy. A curated collection of prompts, workflows, productivity tips, and AI assistant how-tos that work with whatever stack your organisation uses.

There is a blog post telling some of the history of it too:

Like most councils, we started with AI prompt training/Lunch & Learns in Croydon. Decent sessions, good attendance, positive feedback forms. And then not much changed. People went back to full inboxes and busy days, and whatever they’d learned about prompt engineering faded before it had a chance to stick.That wasn’t a failure of facilitators or staff, it was the wrong approach for the world we live in today. A housing officer with a backlog of case notes doesn’t want to become a prompt engineer, they just want their Tuesday afternoon back. So we flipped it.

Looks like it is just a prototype at the moment, so could disappear at any time.

I’d be interested to know how helpful folk think this might be. I suppose a lot of it depends on the breadth of the rollout of LLM tools in the organisation – and I’m not sure having a pre-written prompt would go that far in persuading a busy officer to spend time experimenting, if they are already nervous or sceptical?

A key principle of our low code platform approach is to build reusable components that can support multiple services.

Over the last two sprints, James Coleman, Senior Digital Developer, has introduced several new platform patterns, including:

• enhanced filtered list functionality within back-office interfaces, making it easier for users to see which cases require actions
• integrated PDF viewing within portal applications, allowing documents to be viewed directly without requiring downloads
• continued work towards a more accessible HTML-based document experience, ensuring we improve accessibility while providing a practical interim solution through integrated document viewing

These patterns help us develop new applications more quickly while providing a more consistent user experience across the platform.

Following this journey is such a good learning resource for other councils about to embark on similar work!

Like many digital teams, one of our biggest lessons has been learning to balance stakeholder requests with genuine user needs. Sometimes the challenge is not building quickly but making sure we are solving the right problem first. This is where discovery, prioritisation and continuous feedback become so important.

There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier).

It’s full of such zingers.

Over the last eighteen months a distinct cohort of governments has produced fast measurable gains in digital government. These aren’t “just” against international rankings (the biennial UN Index will be refreshed this autumn), but by governments that have delivered digital services at scale for most citizens. This note examines how the digital centres of six of those governments — Greece, the Philippines, Brazil, Japan, Ukraine and Malaysia — are actually constructed: where responsibility for digital sits, how senior and how well-sponsored the person holding it is, and, above all, the mechanism by which that centre can compel consistency from the rest of government.