Botched executions in the USA

simon gray — 2026-10-01, 03:24:58 - 264 words

As yet another execution in the USA is botched, it's worth pointing out that the death penalty there is designed to be Cruel And Unusual by design; by design it causes the maximum amount of stress and trauma to the condemned person, even when it is not botched.

Even when everything goes smoothly to plan, the methods used to judicially murder people — gas chamber, lethal injection, electric chair, and firing squad — draw the process out as the condemned is marched from their cell to the execution chamber, and tied to a gurney, a chair, or a post, and any further preparations made before the execution itself is delivered.

And then when the process itself is started, it is not instant; the choices of chemicals and gasses used, the action of electrocution or of shooting somebody, make for minutes of sheer torture in agony for the final minutes of life.

By contrast, the long drop method of hanging as used in Britain in the first half of the 20th Century at least makes for an instant death from the drop, and the whole overall process itself was over [...]

Read the rest of Botched executions in the USA .

Conviction and punishment for sexual assault

simon gray — 2026-09-22, 20:10:41 - 552 words

Over on Threads, another user said thus:

Castration for sex offenders should just be a basic requirement.

It's not an unpopular thing to say; the urge to viscerally respond to a viscerally wicked crime is understandable.

There are many reasons why it's not actually a good idea, not least because, as I replied:

Well, it might stop the ability to reoffend with the penis being the principle weapon used in the assault, but there are plenty of ways of sexually assaulting people without using one’s penis as a weapon, and indeed it wouldn’t stop the ability for a physically stronger person to exercise violent control over a physically weaker person, which is mainly what most people who commit sexual assault are doing.

To which the other person replied to the effect that the death penalty could be the alternative. 

Again, viscerally understandable, but in practice an even worse answer.

If you’re going to kill the rapist, they might as well kill their victim when they’re done.

Plus, see the already woefully low — for a variety of reasons, some of which have solutions — conviction rate for rape plummet even further, since the whole reason the death penalty was abolished in the UK was people who had [...]

Read the rest of Conviction and punishment for sexual assault .

Private sector forms functionality - just as bad if not worse than the public sector

simon gray — 2023-10-30, 11:25:28 - 152 words

In #LocalGov #LocalGovDigital we're rightly concerned about how too much of our online service design and user experience falls short of the high expectations many of us would like to see of it.

But having to deal with an online letting agent's landlord/tenant portal right now, oh my days, the worst pothole form I've ever completed is a breeze compared to this.

Speaking to somebody from the letting agent's office just, she said 'I have a word for it', which I responded 'the word I have for it is abomination!' She went on to say at the previous place she worked they tried the particular product portal for a week and got rid of it it was so bad.

It's the year 12,023 of the Human Era. The Internet should be better than this by now.

Read the rest of Private sector forms functionality - just as bad if not worse than the public sector .

Never Mind The Glen Miller, Here's The Sex Pistols

simon gray — 2023-10-28, 11:27:27 - 381 words

I posted the following on Facebook two years ago. The people who were 16 when Never Mind The Bollocks came out are this year now 62.

#marketing #advertising #stereotypes

Today is a significant day not just in music history, but in marketing history.

It's 44 years to the day since the UK release of the Sex Pistols' debut album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols.

'What is the significance of a 44th year anniversary?', I hear you ask.

Well, let me answer that question for you.

44 years ago today, when the album was released, people who were 16 on that date would have been born in 1961. ie, people who were born in 1961, would have been old enough to get married, have children, do various other things which are the first steps that the UK's legal framework considers to be 'becoming an adult'. And those nascent adults in 1977 when Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols was released will now be 60.

So when those people who were 16 when NMTB,HTSP came out, when their grandmothers were 60 they would have retired. Indeed now, although the [...]

Read the rest of Never Mind The Glen Miller, Here's The Sex Pistols .

So you want to build a new council website, but why? What's wrong with your current one?

simon gray — 2023-09-28, 18:25:55 - 967 words

The public sector digital legend that is Dave Briggs has recently started a collaborative project, the New Council Website Playboard - a shared generic high level plan for councils to use as a starting point for their own website redevelopment projects.

One of the cards I've added to it is 'Carry out an Irritations Audit'.

What does this mean? Well, pour yourself a drink and get a biscuit and I'll tell you.

If you're wanting to rebuild, redesign, re-whatever your council website, then there's obviously something wrong with the existing one. In my experience, what people feel is wrong with it boils down to one of two things (or sometimes both) - either the technology that makes the website happen, the web Content Management System, or the content itself. This analysis of what might be called the Problem Statement often ends there - 'our CMS is old now' or 'our site is too hard to navigate'. Teams might dig a little deeper and do something of a content audit to decide what pages are no longer relevant (or outdated, or trivial...), or they might have concluded there's no way the existing CMS can be adapted to deliver pages meeting modern accessibility [...]

Read the rest of So you want to build a new council website, but why? What's wrong with your current one? .

Make a plan for the system going down

simon gray — 2023-08-30, 11:41:52 - 370 words

So it's looking almost certain that what caused the UK National Air Traffic Services' computer system to go down for several hours was some dodgy data in an inbound flight plan.

Make a plan for the system going down .

To Microsite or Not To Microsite, or, What’s the council website actually for?

simon gray — 2023-08-15, 18:49:44 - 2048 words

I’ve not been involved in council website content for a good few years now, but obviously that hasn’t stopped me taking an interest in it. 

In my early years working in local government, my job was as Web Communications Officer, working initially as part of a directorate — a group of related service areas — communications team, then moving to the Corporate Webteam in the Corporate Communications team. As a directorate Web Communications Officer it was essentially my job to take facts from service areas within my team’s portfolio and turn those facts into engaging web copy. Sometimes I got to play journalist a little too, such as when I attended the statutory public inquiry associated with a major infrastructure project within my portfolio and summarised the proceedings as part of the latest update on the project for the website. 

One of my regular frustrations during that period was the near-daily occurrence of me walking out into town for lunchtime and seeing the headline boards in front of the newsstands selling the city’s local paper, splurging a big announcement about some big new initiative within our portfolio, and seeing that headline would more often than not be the first I’d heard of [...]

Read the rest of To Microsite or Not To Microsite, or, What’s the council website actually for? .

How about a LocalGovDigital consultancy?

simon gray — 2023-08-07, 17:14:09 - 627 words

In the LocalGovDigital sector, within our respective councils we spend an awful lot of money engaging consultants to help us do things.

Sometimes, the expenditure on the consultancy is genuinely justified - there's a skills gap within the organisation that training won't adequately fill immediately, because skills require experience as well as knowledge, and the consultants can provide both for the period of engagement; if the consultants are good, and the contract is robust, the terms of engagement for the consultancy will include proper knowledge transfer to enable the organisation to not need to engage the consultancy again.

Sometimes, the consultants are engaged not because of a skills gap, but because of a capacity gap - the skills exist within the organisation, but there are four people employed to do the job and there's a temporary need to do eight people's worth of work in a short space of time. As it happens, that's how I entered the sector in the first place, though it would be an exaggeration to say I was employed as a consultant!

Sometimes, though, there isn't actually a skills or capacity gap at all; there's the unflattering characterisation of consultants that what they do is interview all the staff [...]

Read the rest of How about a LocalGovDigital consultancy? .

Should the council have a citizen app?

simon gray — 2023-06-28, 18:25:34 - 719 words

Tl;dr - I refer the reader to Betteridge's law of headlines.

But if you have a few moments spare in your busy day, the answer in most cases is the same, however there's a more nuanced argument to the question than just a single word.

It's a question I've seen many times in LocalGovDigital circles, and since it came up again in the Slack group recently I thought it might be helpful to put my answer to the person asking the question there in the form of a post for a wider audience.

So the first and foremost question for any council considering building an app might be what is the established clear user need for an app that a good mobile-first website can't provide?

And by 'established clear user need', I don't mean "as a civically-engaged citizen, I need to tell the council about a pothole or some flytipping I've just seen whilst out and about, so that I can drive safely along that road next week". The question is, is there a clear user need for an app which a user will download to their phone (and remember on which screen or folder the icon for the app is kept) which you can [...]

Read the rest of Should the council have a citizen app? .

Service menu ordering on council websites

simon gray — 2023-06-21, 18:37:15 - 1583 words

A friend this morning directed me to a link to a certain council website, which she was fairly sure had been completely redesigned recently (at the time of writing the Internet Archive WayBack Machine seems to be down, so I can't check). She'd sent it to me because she was aghast at something she saw on it, but what I saw below what she was aghast about was even more terrible to behold...

A service menu on the website home page thus:

What is this random order this list of links has been presented in?

If you know me well, you know the extent to which this sort of thing rattles my cage. In order to get myself even more rattled, I went to three other council website with a similar home page service menu User Experience strategy:

Read the rest of Service menu ordering on council websites .