Matt Knight

Gil de Ferran - Wikipedia

Classy drive from Lando, classy dedication of the win to a classy Brazilian driver: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_de_...

Ah, the memories. Does HoHo still have the sodding lethal spiral stairs and the security folk who’ll rugby tackle you to the ground if you try and walk up them with a cup of tea? Took me months to find the back stairs that everyone else used.

Pencilled note next to practice times saying ‘the timekeepers confused Hanson’s Maserati with Dobson’s, which Martin was practicing with. Hence the speed!’

Bought a 2nd hand book about 1930s motor racing. Found pencilled amendments to the times for the first full Donington Grand Prix in 1937, so followed the inscription to find the previous owner: quite a life en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta...

Where are the public sector reformers? Can you help us find them?

At @kinship.works, we thought we'd try to map the different public sector reform 'tribes' & where to find them (orgs, events, networks/communities, online spaces, newsletters/publications/podcasts etc) - but we need your help!

‘At the end of the day, he ran back into the office and shouted, "PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW CARS WORK, YOU GUYS."’

My experience is that the definition of private beta in the std allows a lot of room - it can be time limited, user number limited, etc. IMO, critical factor with (private and public) beta is that there’s an alternative to fail over to (online or offline) if something fails in scale up.

Agree. And I think the standard should support that. One of the questions I used to ask teams as a lead assessor was to show me part of the service that had iterated multiple times, what had been thrown away, and why. But an assurance process can’t replace the role of leadership and risk appetite.

“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late” - Reid Hoffman.

But this requires genuine psychological safety and cover for the people doing the ‘scrappy real world test’, which is difficult in government.

Apologies - last link should be

www.iterate.org.uk/the-value-of...

(Two things I wrote that make similar points in more words:

1. www.iterate.org.uk/why-user-res...

2. www.iterate.org.uk/a-governance...)

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- the most radical point of the standard is that, unlike every other governance standard, it gives a voice to the real end user. Policy makers on their own, technologists on their own… are really bad at guessing what users do. User Research is the radical democratisation of service creation.

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- Discoveryitis can’t be blamed on the standard: there is deliberately no assessment to exit Disco and most of what gets called Disco is actually Alpha
- Testing things by building production quality code is always tempting to technical people and always inefficient and always constraining

As someone involved a tiny bit in creation/revision of the Service Standard, I acknowledge both the creeping encroachment of Goodhart’s law and the fact that it has its roots in an attempt to prevent government in 2013 from self-harm.

But…

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The 5 stages of tech debt from brittanyellich

The 5 Stages of Tech Debt, a 🧵

(Based on a true story)

Something that not enough people know about SQLite is that it's in the public domain because it's a product of government. General Dynamics made it on contract with the U.S. Navy.

When government software is affirmatively placed in the public domain, and the code is public, good things can happen!

A four-panel xkcd comic shows two stick figure characters: one standing and one sitting at a computer. Panel 1: The standing character points to a small box on the floor with a cord coming from it. Standing character: “What’s this?” Sitting character: “The cloud.” Panel 2: The standing character looks confused. Standing character: “Huh? I always thought ‘the cloud’ was a huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere.” Sitting character replies: “Yeah, but everyone buys server time from everyone else. In the end, they’re all getting it here.” Panel 3: The standing character asks: “How? You’re on a cable modem.” The sitting character responds: “There’s a lot of caching.” The standing character, now looking at the long cord stretched across the room, asks: “Should the cord be stretched across the room like this?” Sitting character answers: “Of course. It has to reach the server, and the server is over there.” Panel 4: The cord stretches across the floor between them. Standing character: “What if someone trips on it?” Sitting character: “Who would want to do that? It sounds unpleasant.” Standing character: “Uh. Sometimes people do stuff by accident.” Sitting character: “I don’t think I know anybody like that.” (alt text by ChatGPT)

#XKCD readers know what happened to #AWS ...

https://xkcd.com/908/

Rare example of an academic report written as clearly as an early GDS blog post.

(And ‘Jeff Bezos doesn’t come around your house for a workshop every time you want to buy a book from Amazon’ is a great line.)

signin.account.gov.uk/terms-and-co...

One for the GDS gang. These T’s & C’s need reviewing.

Not least the section “Governing Law” which has an obvious issue when you read the Welsh version ;)

You saw through my cunning plan… would still make a decent travelogue.

Passmore Edwards funded institutions for me.

That does look more achievable on the numbers front as well.

Carnegie funded public library buildings is a tempting one, personally.

When I was at school, the person who got 100% attendance in a year got a gold cup; ‘academic excellence’ got you a photocopied piece of paper. Top employers in the local area: steelworks and entry level government form processing.

Most of government is mostly Excel, most of the time.

Data standards for the spreadsheet infrastructure. Platforms can come later.

Bilingual Content Designer (Welsh and English) :National

We're recruiting for a Bilingual Content Designer (Welsh and English) on our team, please spread the word to anyone who might be interested! www.jobtrain.co.uk/justicedigit...

Subtitles for S4C.

Of all the things I hoped would cause riots before it was allowed to occur… who has allowed Paddington to close their M&S food hall without advance warning? It wasn’t great but the alternatives are so much worse. #firstworldproblems

My daughter is ten. Today she came back from school and told me that their class had elected a digital director.

Yep, I understand why but the whole idea of buying an entirely different game for the sake of leaving a single rule out leaves me cold.

(Honest admission: one of the bonuses of a 10 year old is that she doesn’t know that playing Settlers of Catan is a gaming cliche and will still play me..)