PD Newsletter #55: China. Clubhouse. Plus, we're hiring

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We are hiring. We’re looking for highly experienced leaders to run our public service transformation engagements with major clients on a national level. Here’s more information on the role. Share it, pass it on.

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@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

🇬🇧 The team at the UK’s Government Digital Service has published the GOV.UK roadmap for the 2020/2021 financial year. It shows what they’ve recently shipped, what’s up next and what the team is exploring. Clear, concise. More context in this post.

🇨🇦 It’s been 6 months since the Canadian Digital Service released its covid alert app. This post about collecting performance metrics while protecting citizens’ privacy is insightful. Nice touch to include a full list of the specific metrics the app is collecting.

👏 Product alignment at Miro – one of the fastest growing B2B start-ups ever. For context, they’ve grown from 3 million users and around 300 employees to around 12 million users and 600 employees in less than a year. Plus, post includes templates for product alignment documents.

💪 Wow.how is a collection of ways of working guidance. How to prioritise is great. Personal highlight is How to write bad first drafts – reassuring to remember that “all first drafts are bad” as you stare at a blank page. It’s put together by Giles Turnbull, Jamie Arnold and Lawrence Kitson – all members of the Public Digital network – and you can sign up for updates.

State of technology

🇸🇦 Activists fear Google’s deal to provide cloud services in Saudi Arabia will help the Saudi government control local digital activity. This piece from Coda gives history on why dissidents are accusing the tech giant of “bolstering a brutal dictatorship”, reminds us of Google’s statement on ‘AI applications we will not pursue’, and asks how those principles (particularly numbers 3 and 4) can be upheld.
Good time to mention the Public Digital positions again? 😜

💚 In How to put faith in UX design, author Scott Berkun talks design ethics. The post builds on this Twitter thread (TL;DR: “It's ONLY when the person with the power to uphold a policy and pay for it does so that an ethical standard becomes real.”) Nice commentary here which links to this post which discusses consumer versus provider responsibility in terms of the planet. “as a creator I am the killer. Pollution is a design and engineering choice, not a consumer consequence.”


😱 Last month, Adobe finally shut down Flash and remote-killed all of the remaining clients. Despite 3 years of warnings, not everyone realised it was going to be turned off. A Chinese regional train system which had operating dashboards that relied on Flash went down. They 'fixed' the problem by installing a hacked, pirate version. Meanwhile, the South African tax office had not migrated all of its filing pages, so people could not submit their taxes on time. Work-around: a custom web browser with Flash built-in that can only connect to their website.

🇨🇳 3 tech stories in China

🔳 This month, China’s regulatory watchdog brought in new anti-monopoly regulations to help end tech giants’ monopolistic behaviors such as “limiting e-payment channels for customers, price discrimination between new and old customers and edging out smaller industry competitors.” Related: The disappearance and reappearance of Jack Ma, Alibaba co-founder, and the social media scandal involving another Alibaba exec that could have sparked the whole crackdown. Quite the story.

🔳 Huawei has taken legal action to challenge the ‘national security threat’ tag Trump slapped on the company. New administration, new outlook? Watch this space. 👀

🔳 Clubhouse (audio-only, real-time chat app based in San Francisco) was available in mainland China for a short time. And then conversations got political. (Ai Weiwei and other activists joined). Now Clubhouse is only available through a virtual private network.

Digital government

🇺🇸 Last week, Ron Wyden, US Senator for Oregon, introduced legislation to streamline unemployment systems to get help to people who need it more quickly. Nice post from Nava Public Benefit Corporation laying out recommendations based on lessons learnt. Main takeaway: solve big problems incrementally with small, flexible tools – not surprising but very reassuring. More history and stats on unemployment failures in this New York Times editorial.

❓ Government as a platform – who pays? by Richard Pope and Dr Antonio Weiss sets out considerations and implications – something to share with policy makers.

💭 Interesting report from The European Commission's Science and Knowledge service: ‘Technology and Democracy: Understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making’. The report identifies challenges that emerge when we interact politically on online platforms that are not subject to much public oversight or democratic governance, and looks at what it means for policy making. Summary here. Keep this fact checker in mind to avoid being stamped with a ‘This claim is disputed’ label.

🌎 The Colorado Digital Service team looks back at their achievements in their first year (spoiler: there are many) and ruminates on the ‘superpowers’ that an incredibly strong civic tech network has brought them. Onwards.

News from Public Digital

🇪🇸 We’re excited about a new partnership we’ve started with the IE PublicTech Lab (part of IE University in Spain) to host an 8-week programme on digital transformation in the public sector. The course will be delivered in Spanish. You can read more here.

On the Public Digital blog

• Funding digital government initiatives, by Emily Middleton, Claire Bedoui, David Eaves, Rohan Sandhu. Originally published by the Harvard Ash Center.
• What good looks like for digital transformation in health, by Chris Fleming

⭐ 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.

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