Wednesday, 8 April
The team at Luton are experimenting in publishing project based week notes on their public blog.
* * *
Catherine Howe on her philosophical approach to working with AI models:
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to help people get started with AI. Not the technical side — there are plenty of people better placed than me for that — but the more fundamental question of how to approach it. What mindset do you bring? What’s the skill that unlocks it? I’m seeing people feel daunted, or underwhelmed, or frustrated, but as with most bits of new technology: the barrier isn’t usually the technology. I’m finding this even more the case with AI.
As I’ve started experimenting myself I’ve actually gone back to skills I learnt in my undergraduate degree and I’m coming to think the skill we need isn’t computer science or data literacy or anything obviously modern. It’s philosophy.
Thursday, 9 April
Cloudflare have released a new open source CMS, that they are billing as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress.
Unsurprisingly, Matt Mullenweg has views:
The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend vibecode project, but it has some of that smell.
I agree - having played with the sandbox version, it definitely feels like the result of someone typing “make me a wordpress clone” into Claude or something.
Friday, 10 April
Interesting perspective on Ai generated software from Quentin Stafford-Fraser:
As we enter an era where software development is much cheaper and easier, the number of people able to create their own bespoke apps will increase rapidly. Either you’ll do it, or you’ll pay your neighbour’s son a modest amount to do it for you. Good and/or important software, to be used by large numbers of people, will still require experienced developers, though they may spend more time guiding the AI than actually typing the code. But software that is good enough for you to use yourself? That’s becoming a different story.
If I could get my head around how it is done, I could spend the rest of my days perfecting a native Mac app that combined my favourite features from Netnewswire, Marsedit, DEVONthink, Ulysses etc etc.
Monday, 13 April
The Local Digital team at MHCLG is running a webinar to talk about the playbook we have been developing which guides digital teams through what they need to do during the creation of the new unitary councils.
It’s on April 29th at 10am and you can sign up on Eventbrite!
* * *
Not come across LOTI’s service innovation cards before, but they are lovely and would be really interested to learn about how it plays out in a workshop setting.
It reminds me somewhat of the good old days of the social media and digital engagement games (that post is full of broken links, apologies, but I think you can get the drift) that David Wilcox, Steph Gray, and I used to run. I have often thought about what a digital transformation version might look like, and I suspect it isn’t a million miles away from what Eddie and the team have done here.
* * *
Richard Pope: Stop searching for AI ‘use-cases’. Design AI into services:
The principles of what makes a well-designed service remain the same as in the pre-AI digital era. AI should be treated as a design material rather than as a product in its own right. The goal of introducing AI into services should not be to create new “AI services”, but to make services work better for users.
|
