Exemplary response from @mythic-beasts.com in managing PHP - quietly and rapidly patching having given clear advice and explanations to customers. One of those services which most of the time is invisibly efficient. And just occasionally is very visibly efficient.
Stefan Czerniawski
Stefan Czerniawski
@pubstr.at
Blogging less than the olden days. Still working to make public services better, now in healthcare regulation.
987 followers338 following2K posts
Tom has been thinking harder about this than most of us - this is a good distillation and a. prompt to read some of his longer posts
New talk on AI that I just gave for the first time at Birmingham Tech Week: "10 tips to help manage AI vertigo" loosemore.com/2026/10/21/h... It went down quite well, I reckon.
A new post by @samfr.bsky.social is always good to see. A post by Sam prompting a response from @tomski.com is a red letter day. The topic is the reverberations of AI for social change and public services. The implications are huge. samf.substack.com/p/drowning-i... loosemore.com/2026/10/14/t...
I wrote about that a decade ago, concluding that 'the absence of leeway is a strong indicator that the system as whole may be in need of improvement' www.publicstrategist.com/2015/05/leew...
A new post by @samfr.bsky.social is always good to see. A post by Sam prompting a response from @tomski.com is a red letter day. The topic is the reverberations of AI for social change and public services. The implications are huge. samf.substack.com/p/drowning-i... loosemore.com/2026/10/14/t...
One of the second order consequences Tom identifies is that 'policy grey areas... may get codified away.' He is right to be concerned - and bureaucracies have carried that risk long before AI. @davidweinberger.bsky.social long ago identified the need for what he called leeway.
"Quite often the technology is simply the place where a much messier organisational problem has chosen to make itself visible." @sharonodea.com in characteristic top form on what ineffective search demonstrates about intranets and their organisations - much of which resonates much more widely
Naive panaceas for fixing the state are frustrating not just for the reason @hetanshah.bsky.social gives, but because there is never any serious attempt to describe why things are as they are and what it would take to change them.
What I find about these pieces which say ‘why can’t all of Govt be more like the vaccines taskforce and AI Security Institute’ is they tend not to focus on the fact that most big policy decisions create winners and losers, and it is this political trade off that’s hard www.ft.com/content/db8d...
A little gem for @paulclarke.com (via @diamondgeezer.bsky.social) "Unfortunately, there is incorrect signage in place where the image of the motorcycle has been omitted" tfl.gov.uk/corporate/tr...
Still not over Horizon, in so many creative ways: “He gave an account that he would go to a car park at Asda, and someone would give him a carrier bag full of cash, and he would then take it away, and then send them some crypto,” said Highway. “He didn’t feel that was suspicious. We did.”
Stefan Czerniawski reposted
Please be sure not to overlook this superb, alarming book, finally published in its uncensored version in English translation by Sean Bye. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...
"A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely." - more great statistical thought provocation from @laurenleek.eu
Blimey this is a good blog from @laurenleek.eu on how algorithms tend us towards monocultures and that markets won’t save us without some help. Read, and follow her laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur...
Stefan Czerniawski reposted
Describing this as merely having blogged rather undersells the breadth and depth of this grand tour of how government works and doesn't.
I have blogged! The State of the Present: Andy Burnham’s new government or - Why the abolition of DSIT is baffling and bad - Why I'm worried about what it means for civil service reform - Some opportunities for the new government around data, digital, open government medium.com/state-of-the...
In pleasing coincidence, this quotation appeared moments after finishing @bluejo.eurosky.social's Everybody's Perfect, a beautifully written ode to the hazy rumour of the Serenissima, set in a world where the stones have yet to harden.
'I did not paint Venice. I painted the moment before her: still only light on the water, a rumour of towers in the haze. Wait a little and the stone would harden. I loved her best while she was still arriving.' J. M. W. Turner Arriving in Venice, detail, 1844 housed in the National Gallery of Art
An anecdote told against Burnham, but which actually illustrates why the Treasury is such a defective organisation. (I have no idea whether he can or would make tough fiscal decisions, but this story tells us nothing either way)
I have doubts Andy Burnham is the guy to make tough fiscal decisions because of the way he was as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. (Short thread) He was evidently lovely to work with, but too generous with the money. Here’s a story from a civil servant who worked with him…
Legislative minds assume too easily that legislation solves problems. Writing rules is easy (though writing good rules is very much harder); changing behaviour is hard. What the government needs but does not have (or show any understanding of needing) is a theory of change.
You don't drive successful change through (cackhanded) sledgehammer legislative solutions. You need to take people with you, and industry. Think of the journey around smoking over the last 50 years. Think about how gambling harms are being approached now (see again, smoking).
Which reminds me of this powerful recent blog post by @mastroianni.bsky.social on rules, compliance and integrity. www.experimental-history.com/p/shame-them...
A great sub-thread by @cjforms.bsky.social (responding to an equally great post by @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social) on how sorting out the easy but unglamorous stuff is essential but exposes the harder and even more important stuff behind.
Thank you for mentioning me. I’m brooding on your very interesting essay. I’ve been talking for years about the “relationship” aspect of forms but there are things in your essay about the dehumanising aspects of reducing things to forms that are powerful …
And with echoes of the general rule that organisations prefer to pay for shiny new things than to pay less and get more by fixing the things already there.
Help me find an outstanding Senior Digital Comms Manager - with a brief to build something new and exciting by helping an organisation shift on a generation in its understanding and approach. And getting to work with the incomparable @joannerewcastle.bsky.social - either of us happy to talk/DM
Autobiographical memory is a deeply weird and very variable thing. This is a story of two brothers, one of whom seems so strange to me as to be almost inhuman (and it's not the one who wrote the story). (@neillyneil.bsky.social - you might find this interesting)