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PD Newsletter #72: Digital x public finance

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

On 21 March, Public Digital partners Emily Middleton and James Stewart are helping to convene a series of sessions on how digital can improve public spending with global affairs think tank, ODI. We’re bringing together people from public finance, digital and service delivery to explore:

  • how finance ministries think about the technology architecture that underpins their financial management systems
  • how digital teams can bring more data into public spending decision-making
  • the cultural shifts needed to realise the potential of digitalisation that could improve public spending

Nick Gates wrote more on this in his post Public finance in the digital era.

You can see an overview of the day here. If you’d like to attend in person, email Maisy Phillips at m.phillips@odi.org.uk or sign up to attend virtually here.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

❌ Loved this post by designer Pavel Samsonov: Design is the art of being wrong safely. “Removing the requirement to be ‘right’ immediately gives us the freedom to be wrong, which lets us bring many ideas to the table, which makes it safer for any one of those ideas to be wrong.” A post worth getting under the nose of anyone who doesn’t see failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.

🛒 A study by Imperial College London suggests that supermarket loyalty card data on over-the-counter medicine purchases could help spot ovarian cancer earlier. The study found a link between 1. people buying pain and indigestion medication for what they presumed were benign conditions and 2. an ovarian cancer diagnosis a short time later. Lovely example of how we can harness information for good. One to keep in mind when discussing the data our products and services collect and whether it could be shared (with consent) and add value to society. Full study here.

🇨🇦 Nice post from the Canadian Digital Service includes views from developer Bryan Robitaille, product manager Stevie-Ray Talbot, and policy advisor Sarah Hobson on 4 approaches to building in accessibility from the start on the Government of Canada Forms tool. Not new but a good reminder nonetheless.

👏🏽 Also accessibility related: here's a one-pager on how to create accessible social media posts from accessibility coach and TEDx speaker Meryl Evans.

🇺🇸 Here are a couple of posts from 18F checking in with public sector organisations they’ve partnered with, for example, the US Geological Survey (USGS) on a project surveying water resources. They’ve encouraged USGS to speak about their experience of working in new and unfamiliar ways while being supported by 18F. Includes links to 18F guides that partners have kept close and consulted throughout –here’s one on de-risking. A sort of softer, qualitative case study. In a similar vein: a post on 18F’s work with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

🗣️ Not exclusive to digital and tech work but if you manage someone, these are good prompts to make sure one-to-ones are meaningful.

🤣 Chuckled at this Musk tweet which is essentially a guide on how to troll a product manager in 11 words.

State of technology

🔋 Can we make the internet less power-thirsty? by the BBC explains the burden of cloud storage on the electric grid. Generally, data centres already remove demand from the grid for a predefined period but a facility near Dublin reacts dynamically when a surge is detected. Touches on the precarious balance for tech companies: win planning permission for a new data centre versus possibly limiting customer storage. True, huge centres must be better managed but what about the smaller data centres that are springing up rapidly? What about badly run on-premise servers? We should also take into account the non-digital experiences that might have been higher impact than their digital equivalents. Also see BBC Panorama’s Is the cloud damaging the planet?

🇪🇸 Interesting from Rest of World’s Latin America editor Alex González Ormerod who looks at the damage caused by overreliance on English in Latin American tech. From dodgy influencers (‘influenciador’?) to skirting around the legalities of advertising (‘#ad’) to contaminated AI datasets that hinder their development. “The deep interconnections between Latin America and the United States need to be further understood and considered as we move ahead in the development of new technologies.”

🌏 Related and brilliant from content designer Miriam Vaswani: How content design can serve international or mixed language groups. Particularly like the idea of building individual language profiles because some of our users will rely more on written communication, others on spoken. Profiles also allow us to keep in mind that how confident a user is – and how exhausted they get – using languages other than their home language can affect their understanding.

🤖 The AI arms race is changing everything is an overview of AI since 2015: the companies with stakes in it, how and when it has been used, and by who (hint: user groups are ever-expanding). It also asks whether in its “frantic gold rush” will Big Tech repeat the mistakes it made with social media and put growth above safety? As always with Time magazine, there’s a well-pitched zeitgeisty cover too.

🕵️ Speaking of mistakes with social media, Aims (‘Advanced Impact Media Solutions’) is software designed to spread propaganda and disinformation run by ‘Team Jorge’ a disinformation unit believed to be based in Israel. According to the Guardian, it can control 30,000 fake online profiles across Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Amazon and Airbnb. Team Jorge told undercover reporters that it has sold access to its software to intelligence agencies, political parties and corporate clients. All unnamed (for now…) Forbes followed the Guardian’s story by stating that it is time to pass laws to protect voters against disinformation.

Digital government

🇳🇬 Africa’s largest economy Nigeria is replacing high-denomination currency with new notes as it tries to crack down on counterfeit notes and reduce the amount of money circulating outside the banking system. However, poor implementation is causing a massive cash crisis and a shortage of notes has sparked riots. The Washington Post has a good summary here. The Central Bank’s governor, Godwin Emefiele, has long-held ambitions to move to a cashless economy – something that appears to be both hugely unpopular among Nigerians, and wildly impractical due to the existing digital infrastructure.

🌆 Learned a lot from How cities make software together. Essentially, local governments work together and collaborate around a ‘municipal digital infrastructure’, the software, standards, and protocols that are critical to a free and open internet. But, in most cases a non-governmental organisation acts as an intermediary to connect them to networks that can design, make, use and maintain open source software. Includes 6 European and American case studies. Enjoyed the interactive element to this page.

🇵🇰 Wikipedia was banned for 3 days in Pakistan last month after it failed to comply with the national telecommunications regulator’s requests to remove what it had deemed blasphemous content. Pakistani tech investors and activists are worried this could drive away foreign investors or multinational companies.

💭 The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington is about “how the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilises our governments and warps our economies.” It covers government use of consultants, public service outsourcing, money-wasting media scandals. It recommends strengthening the civil service, rebuilding internal capability and it calls for conflicts of interest to be disclosed when bidding for work. Quite right. Essentially, it traces the boundary between state and private. Nice summary here by Public Digital’s Audree Fletcher.

News from Public Digital

On the Public Digital blog