Newsletter #30: When design means taking risks

Welcome to number 30. There are now more than 1500 of you: from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to Singapore, Sweden, Spain, Chile, Lebanon, Colombia and many more. Thanks for subscribing and hope you continue to find useful and interesting information in what we share.

New for July: we have published a new edition of Signals.

👉If you'd like a copy of the second edition, head over to our google form. It is first come first served as we have limited copies.

You can also find the articles from the first edition published online.

Emma
@egawen

🚀 Forwarded this email? Sign-up.

Ways of working

🤖
Sometimes design means taking risks: How user research almost led to the death of Halo 2. One of those examples where a vision for doing something new has to take precedence over user dislike of change.

💥
Basecamp have published their approach to software delivery in an online book. It's an antidote to some of the worst of scrum*: "No backlogs, no Kanban, no velocity tracking, none of that". Well worth a look.

*Scrum can work really well, but it stops working when process overtakes outcomes.

🏦
An interesting timeline and breakdown of a third party incident report from Fintech Monzo. It's open, clear and helpful.

🙌
Working in the open: from local govt in the UK, Croydon Council have published their new digital strategy (in HTML and PDF) alongside a public roadmap.

State of technology

China is using an Android app to scan data from visitors crossing the border into Xinjiang, with many visitors reporting finding the app on their phone. Vice have published a detailed and fascinating report on how it works.

Privacy rights look increasingly fragile at borders. It looks like it's happening at far greater scale in China, but powers to search phones exist elsewhere, including the US, New Zealand, UK, Canada, Israel and no doubt more.

Government news

🚗 How Nova Scotia started with users to build online dealer services

🇻🇳 The Vietnamese government are piloting an e-Cabinet system (influenced by the Estonian system). They hope to cut meeting times by 30% and reduce corruption.

🇵🇭From the Philippines: a new E-Government Masterplan 2022, centred around a National Government Portal. (PDF)

🇹🇭 Thailand plan to enact Digital ID by Royal Decree by the end of the year, alongside increasing investment from 100 million to 350 million baht.

🇮🇳Digital India powers on: the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s expenditure under the Digital India programme has more than doubled to about US $482 million) in FY 2018-2019 from the previous fiscal year.

MEIT also published a compendium on Digital India. It's a very slow download PDF of 268 pages.
To illustrate the scale of work: 1.23 billion residents have been provided with biometric-based digital identities (Aadhaar), up from 610 million residents in 2013-2014.

We've published our next edition of Signals. Thanks Natasha for the photo. 😊

News from Public Digital

📝Back in November last year, Tom and Dai gave evidence to the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee for their Digital Government inquiry.

The Committee has now reported back, (unsurprisingly) concluding that the digital agenda has lost momentum in the UK. (Full report | Conclusions).
With Brexit never-ending, digital government is not going to get much higher up the agenda any time soon. These recommendations are mostly non-controversial - which is to say not radical enough. But, some solid recommendations to protect procurement frameworks like G-Cloud and the Digital Marketplace, audit and plan action to move away from legacy systems and advance work on data.
Matt Jukes summed up how I feel about it too: we should also acknowledge how far we have come.

🌕Before you go - read our Winter 2018 edition of Signals, or sign up for a copy of the second edition.