PD Newsletter #89: Working with Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

It's been a pleasure working with the city of Rochester, New York, as part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, a programme that provides multi-year operational and technical coaching to select mayors across the Americas and Caribbean.

Read our post by Heidi on how Rochester used a small team to create a big impact on the city’s data service delivery.

Rosemary and Andie

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Introducing our guest editor

Andie Okon is a public policy expert based in Nigeria. She joined PD last year from a career in public sector advisory roles working on open data.

“My work is all about keeping users at the centre of delivering services that really matter. It’s easy to make assumptions about user behaviours and experiences, but real value is found in meeting needs. When it comes to digital transformation, technology is like the icing on the cake: the enabler that amplifies all of these efforts on improving service delivery.

“There’s lots said about AI in this newsletter, but it’s a tool that myself and many of us at PD are sceptical about. I think it’s too early to say whether AI really is the future of digital.”

🚀A new UK government

AI adoption is at the heart of the government’s agenda to improve public services and drive economic growth. It’s a plan accompanied by much Labour zeal, but not everyone is so sure:

• Wise words from Jeni Tennison on why considering what to automate in the public sector shouldn’t just be about outputs, but about user needs. “We will have better outcomes if we honour people’s digital and AI preferences in the same way we do diverse accessibility needs.”

• Richard Pope thinks that rather than focusing on AI we need the government to reduce the admin burden on users, producing digital services suited to what he calls passive, real-time interactions.

• On the question of policy-making and AI, Gavin Freeguard argues we should use GDS’ digital transformation analogy: Consider whether AI allows us to imagine a fundamentally different process. His post is part of a series by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation asking 7 experts for their take on to what extent AI can improve public policy-making.

In other news:

➡️ This new blog series curated by Nikola Goger at the Ministry of Justice makes the case for the new government to adopt share + reuse infrastructure. It starts with a look at service patterns.
➡️ James Plunkett considers how we should think about dashboards and data in the context of missions.
➡️ Experts discuss the pros and cons of the government’s decision to rehome digital in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Ways of working

🙌 Brilliant article from the Harvard Business Review on fostering - and also teaching - collaboration. It breaks down the training exercises used at companies like Pixar which are designed to promote listening, empathy, and effective feedback. It’s unsurprising that skills training like this has actually been proven to lead to revenue growth (not to mention a lot of epic Pixar films). Cara Bermingham’s takeaways from working with leadership teams tell a similar story: effective leadership relies largely on communication, exposing vulnerability and spending time together.

🛠️ For more on collaboration, this post by Jemma Frost provides a useful guide to workshops and when to use them. She identifies a great distinction between a 'generate workshop' and an 'align workshop’, depending on whether you have an “ideas issue or a people issue”.

🦋 Check out The Wildlife Trusts’ Framework for Cybersecurity - ripe for re-use and a shining example of working in the open. Likewise, this free AI policy template for charities has been designed by the digital charity community to help charities build their own.

❌ The definitive set of posts from Alex Russell on why you should probably not be using JavaScript Frameworks for your public sector website's front end: “Better is possible, but we must want it enough to put users ahead of our own interests.” Another one for public sector folks: Read about why working in the open is good for you from Kuba Bartwicki. Includes some heartening reminders, including the simple fact that it keeps the work exciting: “It should be one of the main reasons to work in the public sector.”

State of technology

🔥 With the US election looming, donation figures suggest workers at the US’ largest tech companies overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris. Their bosses, however, are divided: Despite the fact that Silicon Valley was traditionally a stronghold for Democrats, many of its tech titans are siding with Trump due to a “combination of traditional conservative business concerns and the culture-warring and free speech debates”. But here’s hoping their support pales in comparison to the endorsement for Harris from the most powerful musician who has ever lived.

🌍 Hugging Face offers a concise primer explaining AI’s environmental impacts. As you’d expect, the picture is not pretty, and impacts are already being felt by some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, including this Mexican town. But Hugging Face suggests possible interventions to create change, including the adoption of more efficient AI models, and greater transparency.

📵 Australia has announced plans for a minimum age limit for social media use, but critics are sceptical about its chances of working. Meanwhile Nesta’s 2040 UK Options report on education proposes a plan for the creation of ‘safe phones’ for under 16s (from page 36), built without the ‘addictive by design’ principle of modern smartphones. For a deep dive on the topic, this report on applying children’s rights to digital products looks at the challenge of reconciling the commercial landscape of digital technology with the need to protect young people’s wellbeing.

🚴‍♀️ Tracking the rise of interest-based social media: Hobby apps like Strava and Letterboxd recorded a jump in audience numbers in the last year. That could suggest a shift in user preferences when it comes to social media, with users keen to find “people who can appreciate their experience, rather than those who would challenge it.” But that hasn’t curbed the growth of apps like Bluesky as the ongoing Twitter/X drama drives users to alternative platforms.

😊 We think optimism matters. So we like this collection of essays published by the British Academy responding to the question: “what are the possibilities of a good digital society?”. Covering topics from climate change to AI in the creative industries to data-driven parenting, these articles make for ideal rainy-weekend reading.

Digital government

🛒 Catherine Howe argues for the need to shape a better public sector software market in the UK: “I am constantly struck by how often we in local government are forced to buy poor technology”. The US has a similar problem, according to this long read into how US local government got hooked on bad software. While Biden’s administration is focused on modernising procurement for federal contracts, the procurement challenges among the country’s 90,000+ local governments have been largely neglected.

🇧🇼 Excellent stuff on Botswana’s free wifi programme: In a country where internet access is expensive and the population widely dispersed, the introduction of free wifi routers in Botswana’s public spaces has proven a huge success, amassing more than 1.6 million users since their introduction in 2019. It’s a reminder of the pivotal role that public spaces can play in promoting access to digital services, not unlike the way that - in an entirely different context - the UK’s libraries are supporting more people to use the NHS app.

🇸🇬 Singapore is considering the introduction of AI ‘safety labels’. Like the labels accompanying medicines or household appliances, these will provide information to users on how the AI should be used, how it was tested, and its risks and limitations. Speaking of responsible AI, Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency has published their own next steps for safe, responsible AI in government. We’re big fans of their emphasis on training public servants to identify whether AI tools are right for their work.

🇮🇳 Piloting digital reforms to address court delays in Kerala, India. The use of a pilot platform, ‘24x7 ON Courts’, will transfer the court process online, allowing citizens to perform functions from filing cases to making court appearances without the need to travel to court. It’s a promising example of DPI use designed to both speed up the court resolutions process and better meet the needs of users.

✨ Some fab insights from Beth Mindham on reshaping delivery management at the Borough of Greenwich, and why the context of local gov - its spend pressures, and the need to collaborate across multiple different sectors - presents challenges for traditional delivery management as applied in central government.

Something fun

👀 Watch out Wordle. Guess the graph’s data set is our new fave puzzle.