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PD Newsletter #71: Quality data. Conscious design. Courageous leadership

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Last week, in partnership with NHS Providers, we published a guide on Making the most of your Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system. In it, NHS Trust leaders share the mistakes they made during their EPR development and it's aimed at helping others who are earlier in their journey. Chris has picked out some super interesting quotes. And here’s Dr Victoria Betton’s post on how to leverage EPRs.


We published our 2022 Year Note before Christmas. There was a lot to be proud of across all our sectors from the Americas, to International Development, the private sector, the UK public sector, and UK Health and Care. We worked with 50 clients across 14 countries and we’re looking forward to making a meaningful difference again this year.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

🤔 Thought a lot about this tweet. TL;DR: Amy had to travel in sad circumstances (hardly an edge case), booked an Airbnb and all the comms assumed she was travelling for fun. How can companies design content that works for a spectrum of scenarios? Better end-to-end link-up between content design and comms teams throughout a service? Side note: Amy’s course Writing design systems documentation looks useful.

💖 Unconscious design and digital hate is a timely reminder from Rich Prowse that “seemingly innocent frictionless acts can have real-world consequences” so we must “take responsibility for not only what we create, but also its potential effects. We need to design with intent.” Connected: impressive highlights from The Center for Countering Digital Hate of how collective action helped counter hate and misinformation in 2022. Includes wins on vaccine misinformation, removal of adverts pointing to fake abortion clinics, and exposing incel forums. Bravo.

⛔ Enjoyed Why and how to say “no” by delivery manager Clare Hamilton, particularly the nod to the very British culture of people pleasing. Also resonates: why taking the time to explain our reason behind “no” beats the age-old swerve tactic of telling stakeholders that we’ll “park it for now but definitely revisit.” Nice hat tip to our Why your roadmap should have a ‘not doing’ section post too.

👍 This is good (and honest) from DXW content designer Chanel Diep, on their first experience of a ‘service assessment’ (a way to make sure UK online public services are built and managed in a user-centred way). The service didn’t pass but hooray for working in the open and sharing what the team learnt: notably, to document design decisions.

✅ Lots to ponder in Matt Jukes’ post Objecting to objectives: how useful are objectives and OKRs and key results? For who and at what stage? “Too often the objectives are either unreasonably ambitious or too tactical and there isn’t a clear enough (product) strategy to align to,” writes Matt.

🤣 Ok, PDFs and GOV.UK. Which one of you wrote this, dear readers? 👏🏽

State of technology

🌎 Before the World Economic Forum last week, Adrian Lovett, CEO of Development Initiatives described what ‘good’ data looks like and why, in the face of a global recession and the climate crisis, “courageous and enlightened leadership” needs it now more than ever. Related: Jeni Tennison’s post ‘Data as a Service’ in a city context from our wider work on data as a service.

🇦🇺 More data: this time learning from mistakes. A very good piece from Professor Ciaran Martin about 2 big data leaks (Medibank and Optus) in Australia, the way responses to previous big data leaks have had adverse consequences, and what we really need to think about for better regulation. First post of 5: read part 2 here and part 3 here.

🇬🇧🇺🇸🇰🇪 ChatGPT chat varies in sentiment but this is nice: a dyslexic contractor can now send formal emails to clients thanks to the AI app his friend designed. On the flipside there’s uproar because ChatGPT “appeared capable of comfortably passing the US medical licensing examination”. But how surprising is it? Wouldn’t we expect a robot to be able to recall facts? More ‘freaking out’ about ChatGPT – this time by Google feeling threatened. An undisputed downside in Time: OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic by labelling snippets taken from the dark web that “described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest”.

🇮🇳 Shaik Salauddin is the Indian Uber-driver-turned-union leader lobbying – very successfully – for the rights of gig workers. Salauddin, “neither a powerful politician nor an affluent business tycoon”, is knowledgeable about the “unfair practices of platforms,” and algorithms that cause gig workers to suffer. He’s holding massive companies to account by spearheading strikes, speaking with policymakers, and engaging with local and foreign journalists by sharing press releases on WhatsApp and Telegram. Hopeful and uplifting.

Digital government

🇺🇦🇹🇼 Really good interview by Ukrainian media with Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. Comparisons between the relationship between Taiwan and China, and Ukraine and Russia. “Taiwan and Ukraine stand shoulder to shoulder in defending democracy,” says Tang. Both countries are working to combat digital expansion of authoritarianism: “democracies use digital technologies to make the state transparent for its people, while autocracies use technology to make people transparent for the state”.

🌏 A law designed to protect the internet could limit online access to abortion information. Next month, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments on a case that challenges the scope of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, (better known as the 26 words that created the internet). It currently acts like a legal shield that allows sites to host speech about things that might be illegal without worrying about being sued. Complex and there are clearly pros and cons to this but moving forwards, might platforms be forced to censor rather than suggest content through algorithms? Truly terrifying for those in states where abortion is now illegal but information about it will continue to be sought.

🇲🇽 A painful read: Mexico City’s Metro drivers are relying on WhatsApp to communicate with each other because their work radios have been failing for years. A tale of 40% cut to the maintenance budget over 3 years and drivers using (and often running out of) their personal mobile phone data to work safely. Reminds me of the warning Heath Arensen gave in this essay he wrote for us: Stewarding digital public goods.

🌐 The annual Human-Centred Public Services Index assesses 30 countries’ public services against 5 criteria in terms of their performance in creating public services that work well for the people using them. Nice infographics here plus a nifty tool to compare 2 countries. Read the full report here.

🇬🇧 The London Datastore turned 13 so here are 13 data-enabled services changing the lives of Londoners for the better from crime, cultural infrastructure, and 2,000 open and non-open datasets. Nice post to dig around in.

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