PD Newsletter #53: 2020 positives. Plus, we're hiring

Hello. 👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾

Welcome to our last newsletter of 2020, thank you for reading. 🙏🏼

We’ve just published our Year note.

It’s difficult to do justice to the enormity of 2020 in a blog post. But covid-19 has accelerated trends that were already unstoppable and – because of that – we’ve been very busy.

If the work we do, the positions we hold and the culture we encourage sound interesting, have a look at our jobs page. We’re hoping to welcome a Business development manager, a Business support administrator and a Digital transformation consultant to Public Digital early next year.

Roll on 2021.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

↔️ Great post (with diagrams) on designing for changing mindsets from the Canadian Digital Service. ‘Mindset’ methodology takes into account varying attitudes, behaviours and motivations of users within a particular context. Very relevant for pandemic responses but also good in that it rejects the static situation assumed in personas methodology.

💪 The team responsible for getting Universal Credit (welfare payments) to UK citizens has written a post on scaling to meet demand (the service went from 100,000 new claims per fortnight to 1 million).

👍🏿 GOV.UK is trialling an account to personalise the user experience (neat summary of research and thinking in this post). The trial account is attached to the Brexit transition checker and lets users save their results and sign up for notifications about changes that are relevant to them. This post is about how the team designed the trial.

✅ Nice break-down from BT Design of how to approach content operations. “Often it’s hard for a content lead to focus on strategic work because of the people management part of their role – this is where ops can really help.” Content strategists plan and implement, ops managers enable and optimise.

🏥 NHSX has published a set of digital ‘playbooks’ outlining how to use digital ways of working to improve outcomes for patients. Dig around – there’s a wealth of well-presented knowledge and best practices shared in the case studies.

✨ List of listicles commemorating 2020 ✨

1. Wired’s piece ‘32 innovators who are building a better future’ asks established figures to nominate changemakers doing good. Amal Clooney champions Maria Ressa, founder of Rappler, one of the last independent news sites in the Philippines. Audrey Tang chooses Huang Wei-xiang of Skills for U, an organisation that promotes vocational education and skills development.
2. A compilation of the most read pieces saved to Pocket. ‘Best of Tech’ features pieces from slightly surprising sources like GQ (The conscience of Silicon Valley) and feminist site Jezebel (The spooky, loosely-regulated world of online therapy which deals with data and ethics).
3. Reading list picks covers Steve Messer’s favourite pieces on product management, design, digital and The Web.
4. 52 things I learned in 2020 by Tom Whitwell (source material is referenced too – no fake news here).

State of technology

🏠 The speculation on the future of how and where we work continues. Here’s a thread of snappy predictions from Chris Herd (he does run a company whose raison d’etre is to cater to remote teams). Fingers crossed for these things in particular:

1. “Promotions will be decided by capability rather than who you drink beer with after work.” Remote working could be a leveller.

2. “Hobby Renaissance: Remote working will lead to a rise in people participating in hobbies and activities which link them to people in their local community.” More time for building more meaningful relationships which overcome loneliness.

We haven’t heard the last of this.

🔬 Related to lack of employer trust while wfh, Microsoft has said sorry for a feature that has been criticised for possible workplace surveillance. They’ve clarified that ‘productivity data’ is anonymised and managers cannot identify individual employees.

👏🏽 Breakroom has surveyed 50,000 people to find out about the state of hourly work in the UK: 2020 (TL;DR thread here).
Rigorous research ➡️ robust data ➕ making it open ➡️ fairer conditions.

⚔️ Meet the Excel warriors by Wired is a semi-comforting, semi-terrifying read. 750 million people and 90% of spreadsheets have errors – enjoy the catalogue of not-insignificant errors by otherwise savvy companies.

👂 How tech has changed what it’s like to be deaf – a TED Talk by US writer Rebecca Knill who has cochlear implants that help her to hear. She looks at the evolution of assistive listening technology. This is a good reminder – quite often when teams think of assisted technology, we jump straight to screen readers.

Digital government

🇳🇿 Great to see New Zealand thinking out loud about how international law applies to cybersecurity issues. The statement contains stuff on sovereignty, due diligence and collective countermeasures. TL;DR: condensed but thorough (and technical) thread.

🇬🇧 MySociety has made it easier for citizens to explore local councils’ climate action plans by launching this publicly accessible database.

🇺🇸 Make things open, it makes things better. Superb to see a member of the public raising a pull request and contributing to California’s covid19.ca.gov “Hello! It’s very exciting that this site is open source. I wanted to try my hand at contributing to it,” says jplace in their comment.

News from Public Digital

⭐ We can help ⭐
We have many years of experience helping teams and their wider orgs reorganise, innovate and deliver quickly so they can look forward with more confidence. Drop ben@public.digital a line if you’d like some support.

Written by Public Digital team members

• How the pandemic made the case for digital government reform, by James Stewart in the Canadian magazine Policy Options

On the Public Digital blog

• 3 early findings from our research on digital service projects in African governments, by Claire Bedoui
• Thank you Michael Wilkening, by Mike Bracken

Get in touch if you have an event you'd like to share.