PD Newsletter #40: Thanks for all the support

Welcome to the Public Digital newsletter. This week, a quick personal note to start. I'll be going on maternity leave shortly and leaving the newsletter in the very capable hands of the Public Digital team (more on this next time around).

👋It's not quite goodbye, but for now - thank you for subscribing, reading, and all your feedback over the last 40 newsletters, and giving me the excuse to read many interesting things.

We're also planning a few more guest editions for 2020; if that's something you might be interested in, get in touch with me and I'll let you know what it entails.

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🙌 Also today, Jen Pahlka is stepping down as leader of Code for America, after 10 years. Mike writes our thank you note to Jen for her contribution to the worldwide government digital movement.

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🎫 Meanwhile - get your tickets! I'm on the content committee for the #CfASummit in Washington, D.C. March 11-13. We just announced a fantastic slate of breakout sessions and lightning talks, and the four tracks for 2020 provide guidance to navigate this year’s conference.

👉Register here http://bit.ly/2nV2shh and save 10%.

Emma
@egawen

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Ways of Working

🚨
Make things open, it makes things better: Excellent comms from the FT, on what happened when the dev team accidentally deleted their live production database during chaos testing. Also a good example of best practices in reducing operational risk.

🙌
Matt Edgar, of NHS Digital, writes about his 20+ years in digital services delivery. There is lots of wisdom in one post about how to work, how to scale and trusting in teams.

🖥
We frequently talk to teams to have difficulty finding, hiring and retaining talent. But in some places it's not only a matter of competing, but of building talent in the first place. The Digital Impact Alliance takes a look at how to build a generation of software developments in sub saharan Africa.

🚦
Why the way we govern IT ends up promoting risks instead of reducing them - a thoughtful look at how traditional project governance can lead us in the wrong direction. This statement rang particularly true for me: "The project may be delivered on time and on budget but so much cutting has been made that its quality suffers and the IT team ends up having to absorb a large amount of debt."

State of technology

💻 A visual history of how Google has progressively obfuscated what search result is a paid advert, and which is organic. So much harm stems from these design choices.

👩‍⚕️In more design & ethics choices gone wrong, a software company called Practice Fusion was paid by a major opioid manufacturer to design it in a way that would boost prescriptions for addictive pain pills.

It brings to mind ProPublica's investigation into Turbotax. The only thing for certain is that there is a lot more of these practices out there.

👀 Jeni Tennison (CEO of Open Data institute) mulls alternatives to individual data consent "privacy theatre". Feels like an important debate when it seems clear that individual consent isn't working well.

🎫The Engine Room has documented many of the lived effects of digital ID systems among mostly marginalised communities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Thailand. Not too surprisingly, they found trade offs. While gaining a legal identity can empower people, the collection of a lot of personal data about a large group can also act as a surveillance mechanism.

💰The California Policy Lab have published a report on a 2 year effort to increase uptake of low-income tax credit, using text messages and letters, varied in their design and content. The evaluation strikingly found no effect on increasing tax filing. This suggests the friction of filing taxes (especially for this user population) may be the actual root of eligible residents not receiving the benefit.

News from Public Digital

Published today, our thank you note to Jen Pahlka.

We are still hiring - particularly looking for French speakers.

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