This weeknote comes to you from a train somewhere in the middle of Germany. I’m en route to Berlin for a weekend with one of my besties…

…two hours later than planned, thanks to DB cancelling my train. The German reputation for train efficiency is entirely undeserved, in my experience.

Some things I did this week

We’re working with two different organisations on intranet content migrations right now. In both cases they have a lot of legacy content which will need a significant amount of work to bring up to scratch and move. Every time I do one of these programmes I end up with the feeling it would be less work and deliver a better outcome for users if we just burn it all down and starting again.

But it’s rare that any organisation has the courage to do that (and it’s all too common for these projects to settle for a huge lift-and-shift to avoid the difficult stakeholder discussions, which just moves crap old content wholesale to shiny new platforms, replicating all the same problems they had before they invested in new tools). 

This feels like a problem that’s getting worse rather than better. We’re so used to hosting being practically free that we’ve lost any incentive to throw anything away, digitally. But every out of date, incorrect piece of content you’ve got makes it harder to find the good quality content you actually need.

AI isn’t going to magically solve this, and could end up making it worse by regenerating crap old content into crap new content. We need more active curation and content governance – and again that’s easier when starting afresh.

Started the heavy lifting on information architecture for a programme bringing multiple disconnected websites into one consistent site. It’s oddly satisfying, bringing order to chaos. But I know from experience that stakeholders are often wedded to their existing sites and structures and need to be convinced to change. So doing solid user testing is vital to make the case for a site restructure. So that’s next.

We also started the analysis phase on a discovery with a US client. I always enjoy this bit, looking at how interviews and surveys confirmed some of our initial assumptions, while flagging up new ones. Encouragingly this one flagged a bunch of relatively easy fixes the organisation can implement quickly and cheaply to show some momentum while they work on the bigger and more fundamental issues.

Saw Dogstar (feat Keanu Reeves) at the Melkweg. This meant I wasn’t able to see Beth Gibbons in Utrecht (as they were on at the same time) so I took a quick trip down to Brussels to catch that show the following night. Glad I did; it was a hauntingly beautiful gig (featuring my old mate on the keyboards, and a sneaky backstage drink after). It was a good music week all round.

What I’m reading

Honestly this week I’ve been so glued to the ongoing car crash that is the UK general election that I haven’t opened a book.

My favourite election blogs/Substacks are:

• Comment is Freed’s election briefings
• Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything
• Striking 13
• Odds and Ends of History
• Democracy Club

Connections

With both Money 2020 and Unleashing Innovation in Internal Comms both taking place in Amsterdam this week, lots of work contacts/friends were floating about the city. That gave me a chance to enjoy a few beers on the (finally) sunny terrassen while ticking six people off my 100 People list in one week.

Then as an added bonus my impromptu trip to Belgium gave me a couple of hours to catch up with Mark Smitham. We reminisced about the glory days of digital gov and how it’s weird to think 12 years on we’ve both emigrated, got a new nationality and learned Dutch. Neither of us saw that coming.

Coverage

Ana Neves has made my recent tongue-in-cheek talk at Social Now available on YouTube.

The hotel review no one asked for

Motel One Brussels. Selected purely on the basis it was closest to Cirque Royal.

• The good: 8/10 bedside power provision. Hangers! The Scandinavian custom of two duvets on one bed. Every time I see this in a hotel I think I should adopt this at home.
• The bad: Those hairdryers which are wired to the wall and make you hold the button down to operate.
• The ugly: Classic migraine-inducing carpet