Lucy loves unsexy, boring, functional, government information

I've spent two days going through a long list of small-business-related online resources that I've collected over the last few months.

I'm always amazed at how much handy stuff is out there. Stuff that never gets airplay because it's not doom-laden news, scandalous gossip, or memes. It's mostly tax-payer funded, created by government departments, reasonably well maintained, and helpful.

It's easy to complain about 'the government' ... "What does it actually do again?".1 Ha ha. But in my experience of living in a national capital, the government isn't the politicians on the telly. Or some secretive, Borg-like structure full of lizard aliens.

It's everyday people whose job is to create unsexy, boring, functional information and services. The kind that helps make the wheels of a country go round.

I've just added all these links to the Small Business System. While they are Australian, I think there's a decent amount of pages with generic information that could be applied to any business.

But wherever you are, I'm guessing there's also good unsexy, boring, functional information made by your government. So hopefully these links give you ideas on the type of things to search for locally, or ask your AI robot to find.2

Footnotes

  1. To be clear, I don't think ours is perfect. My current complaint is that my birth certificate and drivers licence were deemed invalid when we moved interstate last year. This is not yet fixed. 🥲 ↩

  2. But be careful asking your robot friend to summarise business advice. Especially important legal stuff about things like regulations and compliance. This article – Using AI for help with workplace questions – recommends checking original source pages versus just reading summaries. The information might be inaccurate (e.g. out of date or from another jurisdiction). ↩