👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

In this special edition we’re marking the month of International Women’s Day. As we wrote last year, building an inclusive culture isn’t just the right thing to do. Greater gender equality spurs growth and enables organisations to build better services.

In this edition, we’re sharing pieces by women working across digital and transformation, as well as stories which explore the topic through a gender lens.

Shereen and Rosemary

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Latest from Public Digital

💥 We were pleased to see our Managing Director Emma Gawen, and Senior Director Linda Essen-Möller featured in Think Digital’s list of 'Women in Digital'.

🗓️ We will be at the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings in Washington DC next month. On 16 April, Lauren Kahn and James Stewart will be speaking on the topic of digital sovereignty at a session hosted by Devex Impact House.

• 📖 Read Ben Terrett on NS&I’s modernisation programme: a £3bn lesson in how to lose public trust.
• 🎧 Listen to Andrew Greenway talk about why Whitehall struggles to deliver on Nesta’s new podcast

Internet era ways of working

🤝 Sarah Drummond writes about building an AI service mapping tool (kind of), designed to help teams get started with mapping. She opens with reflections on the design industry’s “slow decline in the space for critical thinking… in pursuit of the now expected ‘deliverables’.” Katherine Wastell’s 3 observations about design in the AI loop echo that emphasis on the real work of design being in processes and conversations, which AI can’t (yet) replace.

😨 UX design in an age of AI-related uncertainty, from Lindsey Norberg, and the need for work to be driven by curiosity. “When the dominant tone around you is alarmist, it quietly affects how you design. You start optimizing for safety instead of learning.”

📘 A way to counter the unlearning habits that come with AI coding in Dr Cat Hicks’ Learning Opportunities: a Claude Code Skill. It uses an adaptive "dynamic textbook" approach to help you integrate expertise-building exercises alongside agentic coding.

✨ Introducing a new communities of practice model for organisational maturity, from Emily Webber, designed to help organisations assess “whether the structures, culture, and support systems are in place to enable communities of practice to thrive.”

❓The most common reason that transformations fail? This article by Jenny Fernandez in HBR points to a lack of people skills in senior leaders, who “can’t detect resistance, misread silence as buy-in, or dismiss valid concerns as complaints.”

Technology in focus

🔥 How open-source AI hardware can reduce dependency on big tech in this interview with Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI - a public interest partnership focused on developing AI products that are customisable, culture-preserving (their latest device supports 22 Indic languages) and low-resource. “The internet, when it was first conceived, was open and free…. Gradually, it started becoming a walled garden. We need to learn from that mistake and say we’re not going to let it happen in AI.”

💭 Abi Awomosu argues in this long read that the most significant AI infrastructure isn’t coming from Silicon Valley but from 18 women across multiple disciplines who have never met, spotlighting a different way of thinking about what AI should do and for whom. “What the system calls niche is the only thing that scales—because it is the only thing grounded in the full complexity of being alive.”

⚧️ “LinkedIn likes me better as a man.” Interesting piece from last year by Megan Cornish, who found that switching her gender field and ‘male coding’ her language boosted her LinkedIn performance by 415%. Other women have gender-swapped on LinkedIn with similar results. But as Cass Cooper pointed out, gender-swapping as a Black woman on LinkedIn has the opposite effect: “Black + male is not treated the same as white + male. Not culturally. Not algorithmically.”

⚠️ What does ‘safety’ mean in the context of AI? Research carried out by Careful Industries for a Foresight Review from Lloyd's Register Foundation concludes that safe adoption is an end-to-end process, demanding safe supply chains, safe deployment, and ongoing safe operation.

⏳ “In an age of digital haste, the most radical act is to pause.” Interesting essay from data philosopher Ola Gwozdz on our modern culture of acceleration, and how the decision to slow down and reflect on our technology choices represents ‘intelligent restraint’.

Digital government news

⛈️ Leisa Reichelt reflects on what went wrong with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology website redesign, with sharp insights on public reactions to redesigns, and the importance of seeing the difference between “I preferred the old version” and “I can’t find what I need anymore.” Reichelt’s take: “design governance that meaningfully protects user experience the same way it protects security, budget and delivery milestones.”

🔒 “Investment alone does not create capability.” Gurpreet Sehmi argues that strengthening the UK’s defence capability relies less on increasing spending, and more on tackling the structural and human challenges at the heart of its key defence organisations. Last year, Gurpreet wrote on our blog about the appointment of Blaise Metreweli as MI6’s new chief, and the digital challenges she faces in evolving MI6.

👂In this interview from last year, Gaia Marcus, Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, speaks to the New Statesman about the risks of deploying AI in public services faster than governance can keep pace and why listening to the public is the only way to build the trust needed to make it work. “The UK public hold nuanced views on AI, but expect action from government on policy – 72% say that laws and regulations would increase their comfort with AI.”

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Learnings from working on the end-to-end journey for householder planning applications in Wales, from Laura Schofield. Shout out to the team for working in the open by including a Miro board of the ‘as-is’ service map.

⚖️ Finally, former GDS Lead Designer Clara Greo makes a practical case for why equity and justice need to sit at the centre of UK government digital services. She sets out six concrete actions for leaders and decision makers to act on today.

Top posts from newsletter #104

1️⃣ Improving service outcomes: Understanding the levels of change, Alistair Ruff, Katherine Wastell

2️⃣ AI Taxonomy, Narain Jashanmal

3️⃣ How to create an intranet, Lizzie Hines (V&A Redesign)

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