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The dream of joined up government.
Back in 2012, a printout of the page above was stuck on a wall next to the team making GOV.UK. It captured the team’s desire to join up government, making public services radically simpler, clearer and faster for citizens. I’m proud of GOV.UK, but it remains a thin veneer of superficial consistency spread across hundreds… — read more
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Lessons from making Benefit Chatbots
I got the slow train from Totnes to St Ives on Saturday. To close off my recent vibe coding interlude, I used the MissingBenefit API I built last weekend to make two experimental variants of a Benefits Calculator Chatbot. As ever, I learned a lot. The first prototype is a mobile web benefits calculator chatbot.… — read more
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AI and the end of friction as a policy lever
Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible. This is both unfair and politically convenient. You could say ’twas ever thus’. Until now. From parents seeking special needs support to property owners appealing council tax bands, it’s often the friction… — read more
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Creative Commons for legal consent to act on behalf of another?
It’s one of those fascinating periods when different worlds collide. I had two conversations this last week about the need for lighter-weight legal consents for acting on behalf of someone else. One conversation was with US-based Dave Guarino about the need for standards around the use of AI agents that help people access public services.… — read more
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Tooth and claw: AI Agents could eat Public Services
For the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the dangerous agent magic of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork. Don’t worry, I’ve been using burner accounts on a burner Mac – I’m not insane. Turns out that if you give a modern LLM the keys to both your machine and your online accounts, then they really… — read more
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AI and the cost of failure
I went to an excellent AI In Government MeetUp last night, hosted by fellow travellers Caution Your Blast. A highlight was a talk by Truly Capell on researching the use of LLMs to improve the triaging of queries people send into the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Truly made it clear that they were not… — read more
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NHS Weight Loss app: Three million downloads wasted?
Like millions, I need to lose weight. And like millions, a well-designed weight loss app could help me change my eating habits. Ideally an app I can trust to put my interests first. And if it’s free, all the better. While it ticks the ‘free’ and ‘trusted’ boxes, sadly the NHS weight loss app is… — read more
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To make things right, make them for everyone
One sign that your website isn’t meeting the needs of all your users is when Matthew Somerville gets sufficiently grumpy about it to do a proper version himself. I first came across Matthew in the early 2000s when he got cross enough to build an accessible version of the Odeon website, allowing people whose needs… — read more
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Evidence to Select Committee inquiry into Digital Government
On 27 November 2018, along with Dai Vaughan, I gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Digital Government. Courtesy of the House of Commons, you can read the transcript, or watch the video below. Bewarned, it’s about an hour long. A couple of tech journalists wrote it up, while The Times picked… — read more
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Interview in Offscreen Magazine
Last year I was interviewed by the mercurial Kai Brach for his magazine Offscreen, which seeks to highlight the human side of technology, and does so in style. You should subscribe. Quite understandably, Kai doesn’t normally allow the contents of Offscreen to be republished online, but wanted our conversation to get a wider audience, so… — read more
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