PD Newsletter #86: Happy Pride Month!

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

🏳️‍🌈 From all of us at Public Digital we'd like to wish you a Happy Pride Month! We always celebrate diversity and the acceptance of different sexual orientations and gender identities. As an organisation, we support the LGBTQ+ community all year round, striving to create a safe space where everyone is welcome, everyday 🏳️‍🌈

Our Radical How report made the case for governments radically changing how they operate. We’re building on that work by exploring these ideas in a local government context, in partnership with the Future Governance Forum. We’ll be kicking off the conversation with Town Hall 2030, hosted in our popular PD Session format. We hope to see you there.

Elsewhere, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve developed a data service standard for the City of Maipú in Chile. Read about the data service standard and the process for developing it on our blog.

Rosemary and Amanda

🚀 Forwarded this email? Sign-up. Follow us on LinkedIn

Latest from Public Digital

🗣️ PD Sessions

Town Hall 2030: local government for the digital era

Tuesday 25 June 2024 6:30-8:00pm BST in person or on Zoom

Town Hall 2030 is a project about local, place-based digital public infrastructure. In partnership with the Future Governance Forum and taking inspiration from The Radical How, this event aims to engage local government, civic society and place-focused practitioners in developing actionable ideas for influencing wider national policy and practice.

Sign up for updates on future PD Sessions

🌏 Past events

Lauren was in Sri Lanka this month talking about 'future-fit’ governance for UNDP, while Blessing and Mike attended UCL IIPP’s Rethinking the State conference on driving transformative public policy in the era of climate emergency.

Connie and Cate have been at NHS Confed Expo this week, with Cate exploring how NHS organisations are improving their cyber security, and Connie (pictured below) speaking about digital interventions for managing acute sickle cell episodes.

UK election watch

🚀 It’s officially election time! With the country going to the polls on July 4th, this is set to be the UK’s first TikTok election and the end of the microtargeting which defined elections of the previous decade. That’s according to the organisation Who Targets Me which provides transparency around political advertising.

👾 This is also the first UK election to feature an AI candidate. “AI Steve”, if elected to the Brighton constituency where he is running as an Independent, will be represented in parliament by the chair of the company which designed him. Sounds legit...

Read our favourite recommendations for a new government:

🔸Creating a missions-driven government in the UK: Written by Mariana Mazzucato as part of the Future Governance Forum’s Mission Critical programme, supported by us at Public Digital.

🔸Designing new public institutions for the UK: Written by Sir Geoff Mulgan, advocating creative thinking guided by new design principles. Geoff also contributes to this report on designing ‘Next Institutions’ for the 21st century in an international context.

🔸‘Digitally inclusive by design’: Promising Trouble’s report provides recommendations for a new government to reduce digital exclusion.

Ways of working

💡 Fund teams not programmes. Our friend Jen Pahlka shares her wisdom on why governments need to fund technology as products not projects - meaning ‘ongoing capabilities, not static things’ - and why they so often fail. To cite her colleague Dave Guarino: “Google didn’t lay everyone off after they put up search. Indeed, they invested more.” Also check out Jen’s thoughts on why public input is not user research.

📶 Katherine Wastell’s guide to prioritising your services and your effort provides a matrix (complete with Miro board template) to assess which of your services will offer the best cost-saving and growth opportunities following investment. Echoing Jen Pahlka, this piece tells us that any prioritisation choices have to take into account that “the utopia of good services is long-lived teams”.

🧭 Maps for business: Marcus Guest on how Wardley Maps help to provide a common language across an organisation, where PowerPoint slides don’t. It’s an argument which resonates with the results of this study from Harvard Business Review on why employees who work across silos get burnt out. TLDR: The culture clash of communicating across teams without a common organisational language is truly exhausting.

🙌🏾 Shout out to GitLab on its Handbook, first published with the aim to make company information accessible to prospective employees, “regardless of when they became part of the team”. The result is a superb example of company transparency.

🤩 We love these 5 habits of innovative local councils from research by the London Office of Technology and Innovation. Excellent stuff about empowering employees, testing and learning, and embracing uncertainty, even in the deeply complex landscape of local councils. Also features the author’s call-out for the best solutions devised by multidisciplinary teams which wouldn’t have occurred to siloed teams.

State of technology

📱 What happens when the internet arrives in one of the planet’s most remote places? This NYT piece looks at the impact of the ‘double-edged sword’ of high speed internet connectivity among the Amazon’s Marubo tribes, made possible by Elon Musk’s Starlink. Controversy around the NYT article notwithstanding, it’s a familiar story: The excitement of the internet’s possibilities, darkened by the erosion of tradition and emergence of online harms. Not to mention the exponential influence of people like Musk.

🍎 Does data personalisation have its limits? Critics of the UK’s Zoe nutrition app argue that standard health advice is more valuable than customised advice based on heavy - and often consequently messy - data sets. Maybe products like this raise a distinction between being blindly data-driven and rationally data-informed: while data may be easy to track, that doesn’t make it automatically valuable for the user. Plus, this report suggests that when personalisation in public sector services demands more data from users, concerns about data protection make them reluctant to engage.

💩 What’s behind the rise of ‘ethical hackers’ recovering hacked Instagram accounts? Poor service design. In Brazil, where this form of cybercrime is becoming widespread, users are reaching out to third parties after struggling to navigate Instagram’s guidelines on recovering hacked accounts, and finding Meta’s support team unresponsive. Rather than doing any actual hacking, much of the work of ‘hackers éticos’ is supporting users through the reporting process.

🧠 How does AI think? Not the same way humans do, according to a study which tested the reasoning capabilities of various LLMs. TLDR: Like humans, they make a lot of mistakes. But the mistakes are very different. But perhaps that’ll change with the work of researchers using game theory to improve the accuracy of LLMs.

Digital government

🌱 Mapping real DPI growth: There's a lot of buzz around digital public infrastructure - be it systems for identity, payment, and data exchange, or an approach that prioritises creating reusable building blocks for essential digital functions. But differentiating talk from real results is hard. Which is why our friend David Eaves has launched the DPI map to provide data on tangible progress.

🤔 Inside the US government’s ten year plan to overhaul its online services, 60% of which have accessibility issues, and 80% of which don’t follow the US standardised design system. They are working towards a ‘trusted visual language’ and a user-focused experience. We wonder where they got that idea from…

🇳🇬 Introducing Edo State’s new government digital unit. Since its creation last year, Public Digital has been supporting the unit in improving digital service delivery and data-driven decision-making across the Nigerian state. Among the challenges being tackled by the team is how to design for illiteracy in digital public services, explored by Abisola Fatokun on our blog.

🌐 We celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day last month, centering on accessibility in a digital context. Good stuff in this gov.uk piece which uses practical examples, like the challenge to go without using your mouse for an hour, to remind us why it matters. Also a great summary by Digital New South Wales on the global frameworks and legislation governing digital accessibility.

Something fun

🚂 We love Karl Scotland’s parody, ‘That’s Not My Agile’, based on his talk from Lean Agile London last month.