PD Newsletter #37: Signals, platforms, manifestos and more

Hi! I'm Emily Middleton, director of international development at Public Digital. I'm guest-editing this week's newsletter.

In this edition, you'll find manifestos for changing ways of working, articles about digital and inclusion in the majority world, and lots of digital government news.

🔥Oh, and we've just published the third issue of our periodical, Signals. We’ve got some copies to give away, and we’re happy to post them anywhere in the world. We’d love a photo or two, shared with @publicdigitalhq.

👉If you’d like one, just fill in this short form with your details.*

Happy reading!

Emily
@EmilyKMiddleton

*We’re using Google Forms. This is only for Signals, we won’t use the information for anything else.

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Making change

📜Openness, empathy, humility and trust: inspired by the agile manifesto, Adrian Brown writes a manifesto for better government.

🤨Startup jargon shouldn’t get in the way of building better public services: an excellent post from beta.gouv.fr team member Ishan Bhojwani. [In French]

👩‍💻Better than ethics: outgoing Doteveryone CEO Rachel Coldicutt argues for the need to go beyond ethical codes - for the sake of people and planet.

🏙“Creating the conditions for things to happen”: Dan Hill on the role of "dark matter" and design in making change in cities.

In numbers

10 million. The number of customers of NuBank, Brazil’s largest neobank. It’s the most-downloaded mobile banking app in the world, and is part of a wave of new challenger banks in LatAm.

95% of adults and 75% of children in India are now signed up to Aadhaar (India's biometric ID system) and on average use it once a month. But 33% say they struggle when they need to update their info - this and more in this 2019 State of Aadhaar report.

59% of people in the Philippines who don’t own a mobile say it’s because they share a friend’s or relative’s device. It's a similar story in India, Lebanon and Mexico. Some great research on the causes of digital divides around the world.

Almost 6 out of 10 girls in Niger are not in school. The country is turning to digital technology to help improve access to education - as well as a new coding school based on the teacher-less École 42 model. [In French]

Digital Government

📕Richard Pope publishes a playbook on Government as a Platform. It's stuffed with practical advice and examples - highly recommended reading.

👏“We need to move to a much simpler, faster and agile way of releasing funding for digital projects.” An Australian minister is arguing that financing for government IT needs urgent reform.

🇦🇷In Argentina, the outgoing Macri administration has archived all its digital assets to protect them from deletion. [In Spanish]

🇨🇦Canada has announced a new online training course on how to be digital in the public service. Not only does this look great, it's the result of a collaboration between digital service units in different Canadian provinces as well as the federal government.

🇺🇦In Ukraine, a small team is tackling corruption through a radically transparent online store for selling and leasing state assets, based on open data. More on their work and impact in this long read.

🇺🇸Colorado joins the club: with the announcement of the Colorado Digital Service.

🇺🇸Meanwhile, California has shared plans for a bold new effort to re-imagine CA.gov.

Food for thought

DFID’s Chief Economist Rachel Glennerster asks: can technology solve global poverty? Interesting history of the role of technology in tackling poverty, and where digital technologies can - and can't - help.

Good ID: How a risk-based approach to identity can help make services of many kinds more accessible. This article also argues for more collaboration on ID verification between different sectors and governments in Africa.

“We’re asking for a more sophisticated conversation around the impact of technology on our lives.” Nanjala Nyabola on platform governance in Kenya.

News from Public Digital

👋 We were delighted to welcome 13 new affiliates to Public Digital last month! They bring expertise in data science, product, bureaucracy-hacking and more.

👩‍💻We published an essay we wrote jointly with our partners BCG. It aims to explain the importance of being user-centred to senior leaders in organisations who may be completely unfamiliar with the idea.

📖ICYMI: The third issue of Signals is hot off the press, and it's all about transforming government, digital services and international development. You can request a free copy here.

👋If you have any feedback or suggestions you can leave it in this google form. It's anonymous by default.