Since 2020 I’ve been sending a note every Friday to my colleagues in Digital, Data & Technology Reading Neil William’s recent week note reminded me that I never share these notes more widely. So I had a quick look back and realised that they are very work specific (and civil service means sharing them publicly might cause issues) the links I include at the end are interesting and not sensitive.
I tried to get Copilot to fillet them out of my notes, but without success. So here’s a recent batch. I will try to remember to share them more often going forward.
16th Jan 2026
Boring Tiny Tools, not ‘Big Fancy Software’ is a really interesting framing for how we maybe should be thinking about what we build and buy, and how transformations should be considered.
9th Jan 2026
This blog post about working on digital in the NHS. It is about whether MVP is a useful term with stakeholders, and the challenges of legacy replacement – read as being relevant to all our work in public services.
19th Dec 2025
Firstly a long read for when you have a moment, an ethnographer’s views on the changing nature of play based on their studies of a tribe who live in the Congolese rainforest. They argue that Fortnite and Roblox could be the modern ‘rainforest’ for our children to play in without adults intruding. Thought provoking.
I’m sure we settled the debate on Die Hard being a Christmas movie last year… it is. So I thought this year we could consider what constitutes a ‘proper’ Christmas meal. As a starter visit The Disgusting Food Museum’s list of Disgusting Christmas Foods.
12th Dec 2025
Our very own Alfie Dennen was featured on MySociety’s blog the other day, discussing his project mapping stopped clocks. What a lovely project!
5th Dec 2025
I stumbled across this lovely reflection on the purpose of life by George Bernard Shaw.
28th Nov 2025
Tech analyst Benedict Evans has a new presentation on AI, it’s worth a look https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations
21st Nov 2025
I know I link to his work fairly often, but once again business professor Vaughn Tan has written something which feels really important to our work: Why public value and public strategy are different to private sector approaches.
14th Nov 2025
A rather interesting blog post from a Canadian professor on why Generative AI shouldn’t be seen as equivalent to calculators entering the classroom.
24th Oct 2025
This article argues that, regardless of AI’s arrival, we are seeing a decline in people’s ability to think as evidenced by far fewer people reading and writing in depth. I certainly find writing to be a good way to clarify and develop my thoughts, especially if it is in preparation for explaining something to others.
An educator then responds to the original piece with their own, quite hopeful article, suggesting that every new medium has brought moral panic, including novels back in the day. They argue that we need to bend the newest media to positive social utility and not just accept them as they are. What do you think?
17th Oct 2025
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how many different ways there are for a society to configure itself. I enjoyed reading about a matrilineal society in China, the Mosuo.
Jason Kitcat 