PD Newsletter #74: Undoing radical transformation

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

This week, Emily, Claire and James are joining the World Bank’s Global GovTech Forum in Washington DC. The focus for 2023 is on governance in the digital era and Emily will be speaking on the panel about bridging gender gaps in digital government. We’re also very happy that Public Digital has recently been chosen as a Global GovTech partner of The World Bank.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Our latest blog posts

• Digital sovereignty: the case of contact tracing apps, Andrew Greenway

• Leading charities in a digital society, Laura Bunt

• The role of training in transformation, Emily Webber

Ways of working

😭 First, an example of how easy it is to undo radical transformation. Procurement framework Digital Outcomes and Specialists will no longer be run through the user-centred Digital Marketplace. Instead, public sector buyers are being forced to use a contract award service (official name has ‘gateway’ in it 🤦‍♀️) and users are baffled by the massive regression to the “bad old ways of procurement” and the backward step in transparency. They’re also angry because the new service is “disrespectful of thousands of public servants’ time”. Cherry on the top? Lack of open working means nobody seems to know why. Embarrassing. More discussion here.

❤️ Let’s remember some of the pioneering work the Digital Marketplace team did: Improving and opening up procurement and contract data, Creating simpler and clearer contracts, Redesigning user-centred procurement. Thankfully there's huge interest globally in improving procurement across sectors, even if the UK government seems to be taking a step back.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 This is nice from the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales on the importance of involving translators in the content design process when all content must be bilingual. Translator Ceri Brunelli Williams recommends ‘trio writing’ and involving a user researcher “to make sure we’re meeting user needs”, as well as a content designer and a translator who know the context of the work.

🔸 Loved What organisations adopting AI can learn from 1950s coal mines from strategist Rob Miller’s newsletter. He uses psychologist Harold Leavitt’s system model to predict how organisations might successfully incorporate a new technological change like AI and concludes that a holistic approach is needed across Leavitt’s 4 areas: structure, task, people and technology. “Like any process of changing a complex system, that will involve careful experiment, small-scale changes, and lots of collaboration and listening.” Hear, hear. Subscribe to Rob’s newsletter.

📣 Attention public servants around the world who are involved in deploying or managing GOV.UK Notify. Inspired by Ross’ post on the Public Digital blog: The international reach of UK's Notify service, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and the Foundation for Public Code feel there's an opportunity to improve Notify globally by connecting with – and listening to – users and by building a community of practice. Call for participation in the post.

👀 DXW strategist Jane Maber wrote about 3 surprising observations about collaboration they observed whilst helping develop an income management system. Observation 3 ‘It’s not about achieving consensus’ could be observed more closely in many teams. This part is nicely put: “Collaborative leadership is an attitude-based capability… rather than stemming from the ability to traditionally consult and influence others to gain buy-in.”

👏🏽 Bravo to UK opticians Specsavers for this reminder that not everyone consumes tweets with their eyes.

State of technology

👍 Super and astute read from Tim O’Reilly on why AI regulations should begin with mandated disclosures because you can’t regulate what you don’t understand. Members of the PD team enjoyed discussing this with Tim when he was in the office last week. “Regulations should first focus on disclosure of current monitoring and best practices. In that way, companies, regulators, and guardians of the public interest can learn together how these systems work, how best they can be managed, and what the systemic risks really might be.” O’Reilly calls for sensible balance: “We shouldn’t wait to regulate these systems until they have run amok. But nor should regulators overreact to AI alarmism in the press.”

▪️ Sticking with AI, Simon Willison has been writing a series of posts that show how he, as a technologist, is learning about these new technologies. These 2 are particularly good: 1. AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects (optimistic 🙂) and 2. We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics (deeply sceptical 🤔)

📍 BeReal or be stalked? Although the default is private, the social media app BeReal encourages users to switch on the location settings when they post. What users likely do not know is that 'location' is extremely specific and actually means the app captures their longitude and latitude coordinates. Creepy. More transparency needed. The piece also touches on the app's worrying data security: an external software engineer found that it was possible to see the friends of "pretty much every user on the platform, including those who believed they were protecting themselves by keeping their posts private.”

❓❓ Speaking of social media, Meet You, turned 10 last month. It started as a period tracker but 300 million downloads and a decade later the Chinese app has evolved into a social network targeting female users who want to discuss health, relationships, finance, pregnancy and children. Recently though, Chinese women have been creating online groups where tens of thousands of them pray together for ‘jieyima’ – a euphemism for getting one’s period after syncing menstrual cycles online 🤷🏻

Digital government