👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Happy Ramadan from all of us at Public Digital!

This month our work and thought leadership have taken a global perspective. We’ve celebrated the Future of Government Awards, responded to the state of global aid, and begun work with the Government of Barbados to help them modernise their public services.

Rosemary and Blessing

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✨ Introducing our guest editor

Blessing Ajimoti is a Principal Consultant who joined PD in late 2022 from a background in the digital economy and working with the public sector to better serve businesses.

She recently helped establish a digital and data agency, grow digital capabilities, develop service standards, and build a unified digital platform for government services for a subnational in Nigeria.

“At PD, I get to work with governments (and global institutions) to deliver better services to everyone, not just businesses.”

Latest from Public Digital

Announcing the winners of the Future of Government Awards! We co-hosted the ceremony last Wednesday alongside Amazon Web Services and UNDP, and front and centre was the power of collaboration in digital government: types of partnership, empowering leadership, open standards as well as open source and agile forms of procurement.
The winners:
👥 Digital Team of the Year - Kyiv Digital, Ukraine
💡Open Source Creation - DHIS2, HISP Centre at University of Oslo, Norway
♻️ Open Source Reuse - Credits for Wellbeing, Mifos Financiera para el Bienestar, Mexico
🌟 Leadership Award - Christina Lang, Founder and CEO of DigitalService, Germany
🥇 Lifetime Achievement - Nandan Nilekani, India

Register for Data Bites #54: hear about the exceptional work being done by government and public sector institutions in harnessing data for public good.
📅 When: Thursday 3 April 18:00-19:30 BST
📍 Where: Broadway House, London or via YouTube livestream.
Watch the recording of Data Bites #53.

Read our new report on local government for the digital era, co-published with the Future Governance Forum, exploring what an effective local digital ecosystem could look like.

Global perspectives at PD

How can we reimagine global aid in a time of crisis? Our new Global Impact lead Lauren Kahn writes that digital transformation can help ensure sustained essential aid work in the face of fewer resources: “This is an opportunity for the global development community to rethink its approach and embrace innovation in the face of constraint.”

This month we celebrated International Women’s Day. Our MD Emma Gawen writes about why inclusivity matters.

👀 We're expanding our global network! If you’re based in Canada or the US, we’re looking for new people to join our North America talent pool. Watch the video below to hear Kit talk about what it's like being a Network Member.

Read about our trip to Barbados last month, where we are working with the CEO of Govtech Barbados to help advance the country’s digital transformation and lay the foundations for a national digital service.

This month we also visited friends in the Government of British Columbia, our clients for over five years. We’re pleased to be able to support BC as Canada navigates a snap election amidst an ongoing trade war with the US.

Ways of working

🔥 How to lead during an organisational crisis, as told by Cate McLaurin in her lessons on leading through a cyber attack. Preparation starts long before the crisis, not just in technical safeguards like cyber security, but in how you build and nurture your team: “Resilience is built in everyday actions and decisions.” Cate’s piece chimes with HBR’s pandemic-era lessons on leading through drastic change. We’re particular fans of 1) engage with uncertainty and 3) test new ideas quickly.

🎲 Reinvent meetings with this early release chapter of the second edition of Gamestorming - a playbook for nurturing innovation. The chapter offers a comprehensive guide to escaping the default meeting template, beginning with framing the experience as a series of games.

🌍 Interesting reading from Thomas Chan on how to be a cross-cultural content designer, including how user needs - from the expected volume of content to the user’s tolerance for ambiguity - differ across cultures. In the same vein, this piece examines the cost of cultural assumptions when designing a product, and how to avoid them. Take Microsoft’s experience adapting a platform for Arabic users: “Every "obvious" design decision [developed for left-to-right languages] suddenly revealed itself as a cultural assumption”.

🔍 Why WCAG 3 should adopt the word “view” instead of “web page”, according to accessibility and design systems specialist, Hidde de Vries. Adopting “view” extends accessibility considerations to non-web contexts like native apps, documents and XR.

Technology in focus

✊ Read about the big topics discussed at RightsCon 2025 earlier this month, the world’s largest gathering for human rights in the digital age.

🙌 Nigerian start-ups are switching to local cloud servers and rejecting global giants. As well as reducing latency and allowing payments in local currency, these servers are also a win for data sovereignty. Another encouraging story of decentralised data to be found in this piece about an AI co-designed with Amazonian indigenous communities to build cultural archives.

💔 Microsoft is killing Skype in May. As this piece by Mind the Product surmises, “It’s a decision that has surprised no one.” But what went wrong?

🤖 China’s ‘Manus’ claims to be the world’s first ‘general’ AI agent, as opposed to the ‘reasoning’ agents like those announced this week by Microsoft. But an AI agent acting independently on the internet - with full access to your data and bank cards - is a high-risk proposition. It’s one of several reasons why this probably isn’t a second DeepSeek moment for China. Speaking of, Chinese organisations are rushing to embrace DeepSeek, with recent adopters ranging from cars to government institutions to air conditioning units.

💼 Everyone has been talking about the automation of work, not least the UK Prime Minister. Our favourite pieces:
➡️ This long read from Tim O’Reilly explores whether it’s the end of programming. The short answer? Probably not.
➡️ The Ada Lovelace Institute has published their lessons for success in public sector use of AI, drawn from six years of research.
➡️ How does UK tech secretary Peter Kyle use ChatGPT for policy advice? Thanks to a freedom of information request, he has told us.
➡️ A view from sociologist Allison J. Pugh on the dangers of automating labour without really understanding it. In echoes of our own writing about AI, she observes: “technology is not a neutral force that might simply solve a problem… it reflects the culture of the firm where it is introduced”.

Digital government

🇺🇸 On our blog, Heidi Uchiyama penned some strategies for navigating government transitions. It goes without saying none of those work if you take a chainsaw approach, as the US administration has done to both its digital staff and digital services: In the words of Direct File architect Merici Vinton speaking to Channel 4 News, “it’s easy to bulldoze and really hard to rebuild”. However, the staff of 18F are not done yet, and their recently published digital service guides are a testament to that.

🥳 Celebrating the 21 new cities who were awarded the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities Certification for exceptional use of data. From reducing water leaks to developing blood transfusion programmes, the work of these cities showcases the range and impact of public-purpose data initiatives.

🏥 Why modernising the NHS is about revolution not evolution, according to Chris Fleming. In light of major restructures in the NHS this month, he argues “this isn’t just about the use of technology but a different mindset and culture.” At Digital Health Rewired last week, Mike Bracken urged that digital must be the top priority for the next NHS leader. New Zealand’s public health agency - revealed to be using a single Excel spreadsheet to track spending - should take note.

👏 The team behind California’s food welfare, BenefitsCal, publishes quarterly reports on service completion rates and funnel stats. It’s a rare - and impressive - example of a welfare service reporting on conversion metrics. One of several insights shared by Dave Guarino.

🤔 What went wrong with New York City’s $100 million one stop benefits platform? Lots of things, perhaps not excluding the ambition to create a citizen portal in the first place: As Carrie Bishop wrote in 2016, these distract from what councils really need to offer users.

🇪🇬 Finally, Egypt is launching a new initiative to develop digital skills as part of the country’s digital transformation strategy. The ‘Digilian’ scheme is aimed at young Egyptians, and aims to train 5,000 students per year.

Something fun

What happens if you take Sergey Brin’s demand for Google engineers to work 60 hour weeks in the mission to achieve AGI, and ask ChatGPT to write it as a Stakhanovite speech by Stalin in the early 1950s? Well, this is what happens.