What kind of utter muppet leaves their comfort zone? It's comfortable! That's the whole flipping point! If someone said "do you want to stay on the comfy sofa or would you rather change over to a really painful chair?" - how would you reply? The Department of Health and Social Care have stolen me away from my old job. I loved my role at GDS. I worked with brilliant people - and after two years I nearly knew everyone's names! Now I'm thrown in the deep end and I have to keep muttering my…
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A mysterious woman, with a non-London accent and blonde hair, reached out her hand. She asked me a simple, yet terrifying, question - "Do you want to come on an adventure?" Sadly, Hadley Beeman does not have a TARDIS (Well, as far as any of us can tell...). What she does have is an interesting new job for me. Take a deep breath, because it's a heck of a long title: Senior Technology Advisor to the Chief Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Sweet! So, what …
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As of today, I've been employed by GDS for two years. Time for some reflections. The Big Working for the government isn't much different from working for a large business. I know people harp on about the inefficiency of the public sector - I can only assume those people haven't seen how much money FTSE100 companies waste on nonsense. The work is important. Don't get me wrong, I loved my time selling ringtones to kids, and telling publishing companies that mobile apps were cool - but there's …
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I asked a question in a meeting a few days ago. "What if we just banned Civil Servants from printing anything?" To be clear, this wasn't an entirely serious proposal. But it's how I like to frame a discussion about available option when making a decision: Can we just stop doing this thing? What if we don't change anything? Option 1... Option 2... ... We can't ban printers. Some people like printing (who knew‽) and some people even need to print. But it helps us to understand u…
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Bleugh! After an amazing time at #EMFcamp, I succumbed to the post-festival lurgy. So this week is mostly brought to you by Vick Vapour Rub and Kleenex 🤧 🤧 🤧 Presenting I was honoured to be asked to visit the National Archives in Kew to talk about AI strategy. The whole event was streamed and you can jump to my bit at 5 hours, 5 minutes. The National Archives Media@UkNatArcMediaPublish open, publish freely, publish often says @edent during his #ArchivesAI talk @UkNatArchives❤️ 2💬 0🔁 013:52…
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Short week! Monday was a bank holiday (mostly recovering from my mate Pete's wedding) and Friday was off to EMF Camp. But, I managed to get some work done! LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! And the accompanying blog post NHS Majority of my time spend on helping run a design sprint for improving some NHS processes with Data Science. At my dark moments, I wonder if we can ever break free of the inefficiencies of paper and fax. Standards Submitted a request to The European Multi Stakeholder Platform…
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Welcome back! These are my brief thoughts on what I've been working on this week. Work Blogging! I've written two new blog posts for GDS. I love blogging - but I sometimes shy away from doing it for work. I naïvely think I write practically perfect prose - and then a team of brilliant editors descend. They always leave my words looking better - but I struggle with the resentment of any writer who sees their precious words being reworked. I know! I know! "Kill your darlings!" But it's …
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Work A light-ish week - which allowed me to concentrate on my backlog. If you're getting a reply from an email you sent last year, sorry! Actually, that's not true - since switching to Google's Inbox I've found it much easier to keep on top of things. Being able to snooze mails and mark them as done is so helpful to my workflow. My only wish is that I could organise mails by folder. Sad news that David Pearson died. Civil Service Choir@CSChoirWe are very shocked and saddened by the…
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Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time... Talks The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG. Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes. Work Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate after a holiday. As for the rest... Bugs in publishing. As part of my quest to ensure all government documents are open, I occasionally come across quirks like this. Better ODF…
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I've never written a Week Note before, but I was encouraged to do so after an excellent session at the One Team Gov Global conference. Here, in the spirit of openness is what I've been up to, and what I've got wrong in the last few weeks. NHS Open Source A four hour train journey to Newcastle - and four hours back. But so worth it. Chatting to NHS BSA about their plans to open source some of their existing software and to start coding in the open! It's not going to be whizz-bang-shiney…
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After four fun-packed years of Digital Disruption, it's time for me to move on from The Lab at O2. I've had an amazing time, building 3D printers, charging phones from lemons, building paper-prototypes with unemployed people, finding all sorts of interesting security bugs, teaching kids to code, redesigning the nation's gas bills, creating holographic iPhone displays, speaking all over the country, and building some amazing software. Best of all, working with a team of talented, funny,…
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The UK has some excellent laws preventing discrimination. According the Equality Act (2010) it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of... age being or becoming a transsexual person being married or in a civil partnership being pregnant or having a child disability race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin religion, belief or lack of religion/belief sex sexual orientation That's a pretty good set of principles! Ok, so what can a prospective employer …
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