I got back into the groove of writing on my blog at the end of June. And decided that rather than use Medium or anything else I’d come back to my self-hosted blog.

I’m hoping to keep up with my writing in the months to come (subscribe here if you want to be alerted whenever I do) but I may not stay as prolific as the 12 posts I shared this month. It was a somewhat eclectic selection.

1. On immigration, asylum and refugee policy

Over the last year I’ve been helping out with Croydon Vineyard’s English School and that led to our organising a roundtable with organisations and ministries working with refugees and asylum seekers, identifying a ‘Framework for Feeling at Home’ and writing a piece on thinking Christianly about asylum policy.

It also meant I got to go along to a conference hosted by the Sanctuary Foundation on ‘Migration in Christian Perspective’. I wrote up my notes on an event that clearly set out the incompatibility of anti-immigration rhetoric with Christian faith by emphasizing the Christian imperative to welcome and support. A line-up of brilliant speakers unpacked what the Bible has to say, the social impacts of migration, and the role of climate change, making the case that a compassionate and inclusive response to migration is integral to living life as followers of Jesus and Christian values. 

2. Praying for the people who govern us

Before July’s general election God challenged me about my attitude towards it. That challenge inspired me to prayer walk through the centre of Croydon and to spend the night of the election results praying God’s love over every single MP (all told it took 16 hours). 

There’s another blog post to be written about how I used ChatGPT to help me do both of these things in terms of 1) helping me mash up different datasets, 2) map GPS walking routes at a constituency level and 3) build a webapp to help me track the progress of my praying (but you can see some screenshots in this post).

I’m also quite sure that there’s more to come about this. I feel increasingly passionate about this activity of ‘spiritual midwifery’ for a newly elected Parliament (I’m now working my way through France), praying for ‘the room where it happens’ and prophetic encouragement for the people who spend their time weighing up the decisions that influence the quality of governance around the world.

3. Blogging in response to blogging

A couple of pieces prompted me to leave comments that I’ve turned into blogposts in their own right.

The first was in response to James Plunkett’s essay on The Oddness of the Political Moment. This prompted two reflections, one on accountability and transparency and better supporting elected officials. The other on the as-yet unfulfilled potential of GOV.UK in its approach to surfacing policy content. 

The second was provoked by the reaction of James O’Malley (as well as other commentators) to a new paper from Demos/Involve on citizen participation. I couldn’t help myself from unpacking what the recent OECD survey into Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions says about the UK: it’s not pretty.

4. Is the OECD actually valuable?

That Trust Survey has gone almost completely unnoticed in the UK despite the serious implications it has for so many of the our public institutions. Indeed, it seems pretty clear that one of the highest priorities for our new government has to be rebuilding public trust across society.

I think that’s too often the case when it comes to the work of our Paris based ‘outsourced brain’. The work of the OECD is broad and, at its best, world-leading but it’s also an institution with serious problems. Some of those I think come from its members not really being sufficiently invested in what the organisation says, or how it operates.

So I wrote down 10 things that I think are useful to know about the OECD, some things I’d like to see the new UK government advocate for, and one action in particular I’d like them to take, ideally before the next election.

5. Big changes to the foundations of digital government in the UK

Following the general election the new government made a significant change to the ownership and responsibility for digital by moving Government Digital Service, Central Digital and Data Office and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence out of the Cabinet Office and into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

I had some immediate thoughts that left me broadly positive. Subsequent news about recruitment and the noises being made by the new government in general have definitely made me optimistic that the UK can regain some of the momentum that existed before all sorts of things stalled the progress that had been being made.

6. What I shared with the government of Azerbaijan about public sector data

If that optimism is going to come to fruition then, in my view, the UK government has to properly focus on addressing three things. One of those is data1. And it was great to join a room full of wise people putting this, and other topics, on the table to discuss a future roadmap for progressive UK tech policy.

When I talk about digital government I draw on my work in the Digital Government and Data Unit at the OECD and the framework with its six dimensions. One of those is the Data-Driven Public Sector, about which we wrote a working paper and then a follow up report where we set out our analytical framework.

In May I was invited to travel to Baku to deliver a 90 minute session unpacking that framework as part of the Digital Academy Masterclass, hosted by the Government of Azerbaijan’s Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and delivered by Digital Nation. I turned those slides into a series of blog posts.

7. Using Artificial Intelligence to code a WordPress plugin

A big reason why I’m posting here is because this site is part of a WordPress multi-site network with content dating back to 2009. 

It’s definitely a lot easier for a platform like Medium or Substack to take away all the overheads of maintaining and iterating your website, especially if you’ve largely neglected your own for many years.

But operating it myself gives me freedom to play around with how it works. And last week I wanted to see if I could automatically add ALT text to my images to make them more accessible. I wondered if ChatGPT could help me. It could.

  1. The other two are: digital identity (and you can’t fix digital identity without fixing data, just like you can’t fix data without fixing digital identity) and digital skills (inclusion and foundational 21st century skills in society and digital government capability in the public sector). ↩︎