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PD Newsletter #81: Nominations for the Future of Government Awards

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Nominations for the Future of Government Awards close on Thursday 14 December. If you know smart folk doing meaningful work in the global public sector digital transformation space, nominate them. Help us raise them up. Sharing their story will encourage conversations and – in the very best case scenario – it could lead to code reuse which saves time, effort and taxpayers’ money.

So far, we’ve received nominations from 32 countries from Afghanistan to Armenia, and from Thailand to Tuvalu.

We’re co-hosting the awards alongside our friends at UNDP and AWS Institute. You can attend the event online on 15 February.

Amy

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Latest from Public Digital


👋🏿 Events

31 January – PD Sessions: Inclusive services. The first one of 2024 will be hosted by Public Digital directors Audree and Connie and they’ll be joined by guest speakers, including Piali Das Gupta (Strategy Director, London's Future).


👀 On our blog

Ways of working

✍🏽 First up, the importance of documentation and institutional memory from software engineer Duncan Brown who says teams should get a historian if they want their system to last. “By default you’ll forget. Once your team has forgotten why and can’t find why out, you’ll make fewer and fewer decisions until you can’t change anything... You’re lucky if you know enough to make any real decisions at all.” Could delivery managers become de facto project historians, making written decisions a concrete output of their work?” he asks. Reminds me of Giles Turnbull’s work on How teams remember – looking forward to his upcoming book.

💯 Product expert John Cutler has published 10 actionable tips to make the case for slowing down so you can speed up. Gold as usual. Particularly good is his advice to pick the right tradeoffs – “anticipate tradeoff questions from folk outside your team and have a persuasive answer that brings them along for the ride.” In other words, own the narrative before someone owns it for you. An aside: John’s 16 December workshop will be brilliant.

👏🏼 Hat tip to Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London, for this crunchy (and correct) takedown of the UK Government’s Help for Households campaign. Not a dig at GOV.UK content designers – she acknowledges that campaigns/vanity projects are often enforced to “make it look like the government is listening.” When you design for everyone, you design for no one unpicks problems with duplicate content, making citizens work hard to find what’s relevant to them, and the prevalent challenge of digital inclusion. This part reminded me of my Mum, the internet and a cashless society.

😬 Next, a piece on a situation that’s probably familiar to us all but one that by definition is tricky to recognise: The Abilene Paradox theory from management expert Jerry B. Harvey. This is when a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of all the other members of the group because each person assumes the others approve of it. Dangerous! Strategist Paul Taylor has explored the 1974 theory and ventures that “organisations frequently take actions in contradiction to what they really want to do, and defeat the very purposes they are trying to achieve.” Save time, produce better. Be bold, voice those concerns.

✅ Consent Kit is a research ops tool that helps orgs with data governance and document management and it’s steadily been gaining traction. Great to see a handful of improvements around accessibility because, of course, informed consent needs inclusive design. Researchers can now change consent forms into 5 different languages, there’s a dyslexia-friendly interface, and there’s recently been a content audit to reduce overwhelm. Bravo.

State of technology

🇰🇪 In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns is an interesting read from Nairobi-based writer Njeri Wangari. Nairobi bought a massive traffic surveillance system from Huawei in 2014 as part of a national security crisis. Today, despite there being around 2,000 Huawei surveillance cameras across the city sending data to the police, crime levels continue to rise (report linked to in the Coda piece) earning the city the nickname “Nairobbery.” But the real meat of this piece is the alliance between Africa and China. China’s strategy of financing African infrastructure projects in exchange for the continent’s natural resources has been discussed for years but Kenyan scholar of IT policy Grace Bomu Mutung’u says: “If it wasn’t the Chinese, there would be somebody else trying to take charge of [African] resources.”

🚕 A postcard from driverless San Francisco is part potted history, part review of automatic vehicles (AVs) by San Francisco-based writer and critic Theodore Gioia. Whether you care about them or not, this is a well-written piece that – to borrow his phrase – “gleefully chronicles the chaos” created by AVs. For example, coding quirks that instruct them to pull over when they detect flashing lights when ironically this can push driverless cars into danger. Backstory: in August, permission was granted and San Francisco (SF) became the first city with 2 robotaxi companies: 1. Waymo (subsidiary of Alphabet, now steadily expanding its fleet) 2. Cruise (by General Motors, had permit to operate suspended in October). Damning evidence of under-research from SF fire chief Jeanine Nicholson: “Cruise didn’t ask ‘How do we work with you and around you to not impact public safety?’”

🇻🇳 Next, Why Samsung factory workers in Vietnam are becoming beauticians. Female workers at Samsung are frequently replaced when they hit 35 and in 2018, the Vietnamese government acknowledged the high rate of dismissal of female factory workers in their 30s. “...factories usually target older, less efficient workers to lower their input costs,” says a Vietnamese recruiter, so after a certain age employed women retrain to work in the beauty industry for “stability and flexibility.” Thankfully, Samsung itself offers its workers training courses that could help them become professional makeup artists, hairdressers, and manicurists. How virtuous. Rest of World reached out to Samsung for comment but "did not get a response” so it remains unclear what men get to retrain as once they hit 35. 🙄

💥 The inside story of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI is a mega long read and a bunch of it is skimmable if you’ve kept up with the headlines of late. Essentially, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI got fired as CEO. The reason was murky (he was “not being consistently candid” with the board) and then they reinstalled him. Anyway, journalist Charles Duhigg who wrote the piece had a “front row seat” to the mess because he was embedded in OpenAI and Microsoft at the time – he was studying how they build AI. There’s some good (and questionable) stuff on Microsoft’s AI effort but the stuff around Altman’s “manipulative and conniving” character is notable and really feeds to Tech Bro Narrative. See the part where he allegedly coerces board members to replace another one for a seemingly critical paper. Does he deserve his “unnervingly slippery” rep?

Digital government

🇨🇦 Ace to see our friend Sean Boots’ keynote Revolution, not evolution, for federal public service delivery at this year’s FWD50. In short: incrementalism hasn't worked; big changes are needed. In a supporting blog post Sean points out: “Our public service organisations aren’t ready for challenges [pandemic, wildfires, climate change]. We’re too slow, too traditional, too timid and risk-averse. We’ve doubled down on processes instead of creativity, on committees instead of empowering front-line public servants that are closest to the problems we’re trying to solve.”
Public Digital also attended FWD50. Anna ran a session on How *not* to create a user centred organisation based on Audree’s Simple Sabotage exercise; Andrew was on a panel discussing digital service standards; and Tom gave a keynote titled The Radical How – available to watch soon. Maybe.

🌍 Have you seen World Data Lab’s Internet Poverty Index? Dig around. Internet poverty is defined as not being able to afford a 'minimum package' of mobile internet (it sets out standards around affordability, quantity and quality). Access to the internet is seen as a basic requirement and measuring internet poverty can help identify the most vulnerable groups. Very much related, here’s a submarine cable map based on data from Transport Networks Research Service.

😄 50 in 5 is an initiative looking to safely and inclusively implement digital public infrastructure in 50 countries, by 2028. Last month, Bangladesh, Estonia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Togo committed to “sharing learnings, best practices, and built-for-purpose open technologies – including digital public goods – that can reduce costs and maximise impact for all.” More countries will follow. The goal? To design, implement, and scale at least one DPI component in a safe, inclusive, and interoperable manner by 2028.

🔥 The Government is now the hottest tech employer in town. According to Layoffs.fyi, tech companies (many of them Big Tech like Meta, Google and Amazon) laid off around 400,000 people worldwide in 2022 and 2023. But it’s looking like their loss is the (US) public sector’s gain. Is it perks like pensions and a “warm, fuzzy do-good feeling” or the influx of investment that's attracting folk?