in summary
do you ever think that the fact that everyone loves AI for summarising meetings actually means that meetings are TOO DAMN LONG TOO FREQUENT TOO MANY NOT FOCUSED ENOUGH 🤔🤔🤔
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things i looked at, did, thought, etc vol 19
not much this time Seeing like a software company - i found this really interesting, about the tradeoff a large organisaion makes between productivity and monitoring productivity. need to do some digging into the original book the post references. just bought a raspberry pi 5 and lots of LEDs and gubbins but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet 🤩 already im tempted by the PiHut Maker Advent…
hands up people who’ve ever said “i cant wait for my local council to build an AI chatbot”
thinking about AI. by which i mean LLMs. by which i specifically mean public-facing chatbots and that sort of stuff. do residents actually want this? wouldn't they rather use their chosen AI - which already has access to and understands the internet, their preferences, their context? instead of our RAG bot that knows nothing about them and only works within our little bubble? see also: council…
sit rep on day 1 of me getting a copilot licence
oh boy i got one of our trial copilot licenses! productivity to the moon , lets goooooo 🚀 his first test every time i open a blank email copilot offers to write it for me! thanks buddy. i ask it to write an email to a colleague about how i am finding the copilot trial. it writes a long, gushing report about how much time me and my team have saved using copilot over the last few months. (i am the…
a polite plea from a part time person 🙏
if you're running a regular cross council / cross department group in the name of fostering joint working and collaboration... please consider changing up the days you hold your meetings on i know its a lot easier to book the same recurring slot every fortnight / month but its quite depressing seeing group after group you never get to attend, because they always meet on your non working day 😔…
📈 ITS TIME FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT! 💯
every month at our team meeting each sub team in ICT has to run a segment related to one of our organisational values. we were tasked with delivering this month’s one, and decided to recruit chatGPT to help prepare a minimum effort activity for the team. activity > presentation as that means the group do most of the talking, not us 😎 one of the gang recently attended a hackathon so we pondered on…
things i looked at, did, thought, etc vol 18
i’ve been fairly pants at writing the blog recently. another period with lots of head down working or sitting in meetings 😑 with no time for much else here’s a few things that were of interest: Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027 Flounder Mode - Colossus An app can be a home-cooked meal The work is never just “the work” | Dave Stewart i might have posted this before but its good enough to read…
playing with playwright with my chum claude
not sure if this is ✨vibe coding✨ or just standard assisted coding - i work step by step with Claude, i know enough Python to understand and tweak the output, i’m just a lazy bum when it comes to churning out this kind of stuff the problem part of a data analysis / reconciliation project i am working on automating currently involves someone manually downloading CSV files from a supplier website.…
data THING
i've been trying to work on something that sums up my thinking on data strategy but it's more my thoughts than just strategy... the hardest part is deciding what to call it... 🥴 well here it is anyway: i believe that data is not a standalone "thing". if we treat it like one we end up focusing on reporting and dashboards which, although they are interesting, don't deliver real value services are…
a collective big carrot 🥕, or stick 🏏, to make software less bad
a bit more on the idea from the last things i looked at . i’ve sent it off to local digital to see what they think 🤔 what i want to do a short research / engagement piece (possibly a workshop series) bringing together digital peeps from across councils (all councils, not just those going through LGR) to identify common issues with legacy systems i want to engage suppliers directly as for the…