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PD Newsletter #69: Privacy policies and government gobbledegook

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Earlier this month, Public Digital co-hosted the fifth Digital Services Convening with University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. We welcomed attendees from 22 countries to the 3-day event which included talks and panel discussions on the progress – and particularly the challenges faced – by digital teams in the public sector around the world. It’s a valuable chance to become part of a supportive community.

Partner Emily Middleton moderated the second day’s discussions on partnerships and ecosystems. You can read her takeaways now and we’ll publish a more in-depth write up on our blog shortly.


Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

🔐 Privacy expert Luiza Jarovsky’s post on How to design privacy policies has 7 principles for privacy-enhancing design. Examples: users must have autonomy; they shouldn’t need to be data protection gurus, plus, organisations must acknowledge cognitive bias, see users as vulnerable by default and shield them from manipulation. Luiza’s Twitter thread flags Grammarly’s privacy policy as the exemplar orgs should aim to emulate.

✅ Dr. Amanda Clarke and Sean Boots (via Carleton University) have compiled a guide to reforming information technology procurement in the Government of Canada. It summarises best practices in modern IT procurement, then it makes 6 recommendations to help the government move towards them and get better value for money from its IT contracts. Recommendations are standard, for example, reduce barriers to entry, and introduce spend controls, but each is context-specific and many include global examples.

💙 Point stakeholders to Co-op Digital’s explanation of Why we should work in the open. It addresses the common worries including, “what if our competitors see and steal all our ideas?”, and it includes 5 reasons why it’s beneficial to show and talk about your work a little and often. Also includes this superb infographic to demonstrate the importance of organisations owning their own narrative.

🌟 The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales reflects on its 2021/22 annual review in blog post How to write an annual review people will actually read. The team favoured a mini-site plus video clips over reams of copy and an image of “a picture of an executive grasping a pen”. Props to Simon Busch and Charlotte Giles.

👏🏾 Super as always by Natalie Shaw: 5 things that can hurt comprehension and readability in difficult moments. Love a post that gives general advice and then pins it down with real life examples. Natalie includes examples of when a user shares something that breaks community guidelines in a Facebook/Meta service. Cool to see something most of us aren’t familiar with.

State of technology

💥 James Plunkett’s essay The invidious hand is the first in a series that supports the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s project Social justice in a digital age. In essence: “When the car was first invented we called it a horseless carriage, misconstruing a revolutionary invention as nothing more than a modification of an old one. Today, we do the same thing with digital platforms; Amazon is an online store, Uber is an app-based taxi service.” Bunging modifiers in there only plays down the enormity of change we’re living through. So, can we better describe what has changed with the rise of platforms? If yes, we can better evaluate our predicament. Long read. Worth it. ➡️ Just published: The care paradox (part 2 of 3).

🇲🇽 Rest of World reports that unauthorised Shein boutiques are popping up across Mexico. Shein, a controversial Chinese fast fashion online retailer, has put traditional retailers out of business worldwide. However, Mexican customers appear to want the human touch. In response, a network dedicated to bulk buying, warehousing, and selling Shein products has sprung up and is “capitalising on the lack of trust in digital businesses and low connectivity rates in large parts of the country.” An example of how customer experience is intrinsically tied to context.

🌍 Dr David Johnson asks how many Africans contribute to open source software? Lots of caveats (33% of authors on GitHub don’t share their location information and what if the developer is just travelling through?) Interesting that a decade ago, half of Africa’s open source contributions came from South Africa and now Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt are challenging that.

🙌 Every 4 years, policymakers, researchers, lobbyists and government representatives gather at the International Telecommunications Union Plenipotentiary Conference to discuss the future of the internet and interventions needed for the good of the world’s internet-connected population. Chris Stokel-Walker explains why the election for ITU’s secretary general was much-hyped. TL;DR: American freedom of speech versus Russian state control. Spoiler: the best version of the internet will be protected for another 4 years at least. Congratulations to Doreen Bogdan-Martin 👑

🇮🇳 According to Comparitech, Delhi had 1,826 CCTV cameras per square mile making it the most watched city in the world last year. But whether that sounds safe or not might depend on which religious or ethnic group you belong to. Upsetting piece by journalist Sarita Santoshini on the police in India using facial recognition to persecute marginalised communities. From the Delhi police annual report following the 2020 Delhi riots: “Extensive use of technology in identification and arrest was the hallmark of investigation.” Unsurprisingly, the authorities deny any allegations of bias.

Digital government

🇳🇿 New Zealand hopes to get rid of jargon and ‘government gobbledegook’ with a Plain Language Bill. It will mandate that communication from the government to the public is “clear, concise, well-organised, and audience-appropriate”. Love the idea of clear language – it’s a matter of social justice and a democratic right, after all. But should we be slightly wary of legislating for things citizens should just be able to expect? There can be unexpected consequences, for example, in other countries similar legislation has incentivised agencies to *avoid* improving forms under a Paperwork Reduction Act. In New Zealand the opposition argues monitoring will add more bureaucracy and cost. “This bill is the stupidest bill to come before parliament”, says National MP Chris Bishop.🤯

🔦 The Geospatial Commission is building the National Underground Asset Register. Basically, a map of the UK’s underground infrastructure including water pipes, electrical cables, and gas mains. Useful because not knowing where stuff is can mean burst pipes and water mains. But, how open should the database be? Summarised nicely in tweets here. 😂 Chuckled at the accurate forecasting in this one.

❓ Who benefits from civic tech? asks the World Bank in a policy research paper titled Civic technologies and the pathways to government responsiveness. Could civic tech affect public issues in a way that benefits some and excludes others? Does it just empower the already empowered? Read the supporting post here.

🇰🇭🇱🇰 At Public Digital, we’ve been working with the UNDP Cambodia and UNDP Sri Lanka to create learning modules aimed at upskilling civil servants so they can lead digital transformation for better public services. The training is free and open to everyone.

🏆 Brilliant that Laura Stevens and Richard Towers have won an Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators merit award for their Inside GOV.UK incident reports blog posts. The judge tipped their hat to working in the open. Links nicely to this post on incident management at Canadian Digital Service from senior developer Calvin Rodo whose team created a Slackbot that can be used to trigger an incident response and takes care of creating a chat room, a video chat, an Incident Report, and it also notifies folks that an incident is currently happening.

✉️ IEEE Software is looking for in-depth case studies, experience reports, and analytical contributions on how public sector organisations can adopt, develop, and collaborate on open source software. Topics of interest include public-private partnerships, acquisition, sustainability, economics, and avoiding lock-in. Full brief here. Deadline: 1 December.

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