PD Newsletter #19: Wild ideas and trends for 2019

Welcome to the 19th edition of the Public Digital newsletter. Thanks everyone who signed up for a copy of Signals; your lovely messages were a great way to start off the new year.

We've been busy posting them all around the world: from the UK to Slovenia and Denmark, to Russia, the US and New Zealand. We hope you enjoy it.

Emma
@egawen

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State of technology

Tim O'Reilly tracks the “gradually, then suddenly” movements that characterise technological change, setting out the changes you should be paying attention to right now. If you only read one thing, make it this.

On automating your co-workers out a job. How developers, interns, and junior employees handle being on the front line of automation - often by posting on Reddit as it turns out. Brings a human face to a phenomenon often illustrated by pictures of cogs and faceless robots.

CES, an annual gathering showcasing consumer technologies, was held last week. I most enjoyed this twitter thread of terrible products. But for a more serious take, go to Steven Sinofsky's show report 2019 or the A16Z podcast, which track the trends we'll be seeing in the marketplace in 9-12 months time.

The Internet Archive are worried enough about Bolsonaro's new government in Brazil to issue a call for Brazilian content.

Ways of working

Why you should watch what users do, not what they say; via Instagram as a case study.

Advice for new content designers, crowdsourced from Twitter and brilliantly brought together by Lorena Sutherland.

Want to know your AI from your ML? Google Design set out 6 simple and clear definitions.

"You actually have to go out to the to the streets and talk to the citizens"

🎥 In 29 seconds, service designer Heidi Uchiyama (formerly of the gob.pe team) talks about getting the balance right between user needs and what politicians and leaders ask for.

Government news

🙌
Estonia's E-Residency team say goodbye to Kaspar Korjus, who took it from a 'wild idea' to a global phenomenon supporting a vibrant ecosystem of e-Residents from 150 countries. Here he writes how e-Residency adapted and evolved, including an almost diplomatic incident over country names.

✅
The Singapore government is using government agencies to test it's new GovReview platform, which aims to crowdsource feedback on service or product providers, for both public and private sector. I'm interested to see if they can make this work. The idea was suggested very early on when we developed G-Cloud in the UK and I've seen it suggested in other countries too, but haven't seen it land.

🇸🇪
Estonian e-IDs can now be used to access Swedish government services (Link in Swedish). It's part of a cross EU identity initiative iDAS, that has been a long time in the making. We'll be seeing more of this: for example, German IDs can used as part of the UK's Verify service.

💥
Techcrunch made a list of all the US federal https websites that will expire soon because of the shutdown. Not a good look.

French Ambassador for Digital Affairs, @HenriVerdier, came to visit Public Digital HQ this week.