Weeknote – conversations about governance, AI and newsletters
It’s been an interesting week. A mix of familiar conversations and few completely new ones.
I also received my business cards in the post, which felt slightly surreal. I have been running Cornerstone Content for a few years now, but I haven’t really leaned into sharing what I do publicly. This website is part of that too.
At the moment I’m working with three different councils, which means every week involves a real mix of content design, governance, accessibility and service design conversations. I thought I’d start sharing some of those conversations more openly, partly to reflect, but also in hope it opens up discussions with others doing similar work.
Hosting newsletters online
I started the week discussing the best approach to hosting newsletters on a council website. A conversation I have had with other councils numerous times.
Currently the service sends printed newsletters to council tenants and leaseholders and now they want somewhere online to host previous editions – partly for residents who may have missed them, but also to demonstrate engagement activity to the housing regulator.
The challenge was that the newsletters were in PDFs and were partially accessible. They also often repeated information already available on the website, which creates another issue of users potentially finding outdated guidance through old newsletters.
Rather than uploading every PDF directly, we worked on a lighter solution that balanced the service needs with accessibility and content governance. We created a page (Newsletter for council tenants and leaseholders) that explains what the newsletter is and summarises the latest edition as web copy.
It felt like a good example of moving away from “uploading documents to websites” and towards designing information properly for the web. It reminded me that a lot of digital transformation work happens through these small everyday conversations. They rarely feel dramatic at the time, but over time they slowly shift how services think about content, communication and user needs.
Generative AI training
I also attended a two-day GenAI course run by Content Design London called Working with GenerativeAI.
What interested me most was not the tooling itself, but the conversations around organisational context, constraints and standards.
A lot of current AI discussion still focuses on prompts and productivity. But the interesting challenge feels like how organisations shape AI so it works within their own governance, accessibility requirements, tone of voice and other ways of working.
It made me think a lot about content design systems , content patterns and style guidance.
One of the longstanding problems I see with standards is that they often sit passively in documents or on intranets (see my previous post about this). Teams know they exist, but they are not always embedded into everyday publishing workflows. AI could check draft content against patterns before publishing.
This feels like the more important shift AI could enable. Not replacing content designers, but operationalising good practice in a much more consistent and scalable way.
At the moment though, using AI still feels like taming a wild horse. Useful, powerful, occasionally unpredictable and only really effective when shaped properly by humans.
Planning a governance workshop
I am currently working on an intranet project where we have migrated content from legacy SharePoint intranets to a new public Drupal intranet. We are now at a stage of thinking about governance and consistency.
Up to now, most conversations have happened service-by-service, but it feels like the right time to start agreeing some shared principles around how the intranet should work long-term. Nothing too formal, just enough structure to keep things useful, maintainable and user-focused.
I’ve planned a one-hour workshop based on:
challenges we are currently seeing
practical decision scenarios based on real content requests
how we manage documents: public vs private
content consistency and ownership
Looking ahead to next week
Next week I’ll be working on some form templates for a council, which is an area I’d really like to spend more time in. I’d like to explore how we can integrate better guidance and help text directly into forms, rather than treating forms and content as completely separate things.
I am also working on improvements to a few service areas such as schools and embedding lived experience.
