Blog posts

This was initially some advice I wrote for some governments early in the COVID era. I then turned it into a blog post, but we never got round to publishing it. Every six months or so I find myself referencing it. I think it’s even more true in a world of generative AI and agentic interactions. So it was time it got a URL. Tackling (coronavirus) misinformation: website comes first In times of change or crisis, we all need clear, verifiable information. As Andrew and Stacey have written, excellent digital government teams are working on that by ensuring they have a single web page for users to get actionable advice. ...

In a recent post, Paul Dix makes a case for “the end of programming.” Looking at the rapid evolution of AI agents and the massive, AI-driven Rust rewrite of Bun, he argues that the manual writing and line-by-line reviewing of code is headed for extinction. Instead, AI will generate an absolute deluge of software, with engineers stepping back to supervise the final results rather than the syntax. That’s been a common theme lately, particularly since last November’s watershed moment in the capabilities of coding agents. This telling brought me back to a piece I wrote in 2019 and revised (with Dai) last year: Untangling your technology spaghetti. ...

I’ve spent a lot of the past years in rooms where someone asks a version of the same question: how did we end up this dependent, and what can we actually do about it? The urgency of the question has grown as geopolitical certainties have slipped away and as AI has grown to dominate the conversation. Now, with my Public Digital colleagues Mike Bracken, Andrew Greenway, Lauren Kahn and Raine Lester, I’ve helped write a book that tries to answer it. Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide is published by London Publishing Partnership. ...

Just as digital sovereignty is about having the right agency and capacity to make and act on informed choices, digital resilience is a lot more than just whether the servers are working. It’s about whether you have the right options and ecosystem to keep delivering in the midst of changing conditions or emerging crises. In the midst of a busy UN General Assembly week it was great to moderate a panel on digital resilience with Robert Opp CDO of UNDP, John Hallmark from EY, and Vittorio Di Bello from the International Finance Corporation/World Bank at Mastercard’s Digital Ambassadors Forum. ...

Finland sits in a fascinating place when it comes to digital sovereignty. Its geography means it can’t ignore the power dynamics and risks affecting our world. Its recent history shows that it can be the home to major shapers of technology, but that they don’t necessarily last. Its recent political statements recognise that it needs to ensure that political leadership and clear roadmaps are needed to focus on sovereignty for themselves and as part of Europe. Their security agencies have correctly pointed out that there are limited options for key components of the digital supply chain. ...

Most large organizations are trapped by their own software—stuck between rigid “best practices” and a tangled mess of over-customization. That’s felt keenly but not uniquely in the world of public finance. Two years ago in DC, Lauren Kahn, Cathal Long and I started a conversation about how to break this cycle and create tools that actually adapt to our needs. Our new paper, “Better software options for public financial management: Some ideas on where to start.” offers a set of conceptual shifts and practical steps that organisations can take to start breaking out. ...

There are growing questions about how we ensure new digital infrastructure and the open source software that’s available to support it are adopted, financially sustained, and managed in a way that increases government agency. The search for answers has drawn a lot of attention to the concept of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), a structure that’s been adopted in a number of technology-forward organisations over the past fifteen years. An OSPO is a corporate entity that is responsible for managing and coordinating an organization’s open source activities. The OSPO can be seen as the central nervous system for an organization’s open source strategy, and it provides governance, oversight, and support for all things related to open source. – Linux Foundation: A Deep Dive Into Open Source Program Offices ...

In the midst of an intense but excellent week at the 2025 Global Digital Public Infrastructure summit in Cape Town, my colleague Lauren Kahn and I helped shape and run a session with a public finance focus. Coming at the end of the conference it was a chance for participants to explore how they might take the ideas and energy from the event and apply it to reforming any/all aspects of public finance: from how we think about tax, to how we ensure compliance, to how public services receive appropriate and timely funding. ...

Great to be back at the Greenbelt Festival again a couple of weeks ago. I’m often involved behind the scenes at the festival, but this year Kester invited Hannah and I to join him for an AI-inspired panel. His write-up was: In the late 1950s, Marv Minsky, one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, excitedly turned to a colleague and gushed, “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!”“You’re going to do all that for the machines?” his colleague replied. “What are you going to do for the people? Now, seventy-five years later, that same conundrum has become more acute. Untold resources have gone into advancing machines… but the question remains: what are we going to do for the people? This is not a panel about AI, this is a panel about us. Urgent, practical and guided by expert voices, this is about how to help humanity flourish in an age obsessed with investing more in machines. ...

It’s been a couple of weeks since I was briefly in DC for the World Bank and IMF spring meetings, but not too late to share a few highlights. Center for Global Development’s session on European collaboration in the midst of aid cuts was frank and helpful, reflecting a renewed emphasis on addressing some of the systemic problems in global financing. There’s a constant discussion of the need for better coordination, but beyond coordination it’s clear there’s also a need for leaner, test+learn approaches to getting things done. Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure - CDPI and Digital Impact Alliance a group of us together to mark the launch of CDPI’s new vision paper on Verifiable Credentials - https://vc.cdpi.dev : simple and consistent ways for you to demonstrate your eligibility and qualifications. The focus on credentials is a really welcome addition to the Digital Public Infrastructure conversation with a real focus on user-centricity and clear options to start small and scale. ODI Global’s launch of a new report on emerging themes in digital-era public finance marks a next step in our joint work on the Digital Public Finance Hub, looking across the field for common challenges and opportunities. Needless to say there’s lots of interest in AI and lots of issues with procurement, but there’s more too. Ameya Ashok Naik’s got a great write-up of the event Co-Develop and Omidyar Network hosted a discussion between Nandan Nilekani and Michele Lawrence Jawando on digital public infrastructure and AI. It was a refreshingly pragmatic conversation, reflecting the rapidly changing nature of the technologies and many unknowns about their use, while noting the need to maintain situational awareness and be experimenting to work out how to ensure the technologies can be governed and harnessed for public good, not private capture. As ever there was far more going on than it was possible to fit in. Many friends and events missed. But great to see positive movements amid the chaos.