PD Newsletter #76: Data Service Standards for cities

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

If you’re working in a city government in North, Central or South America you can sign up for the Developing and Delivering a Data Service Standard sprint we’re co-hosting. We’ll help you create a Data Service Standard for your city, develop a plan to measure its impact, and identify ways to iterate and scale. Register by 7 July. Also worth looking at the 7 cities that were awarded a What Works Cities Certification for their exceptional use of data to inform policies and engage residents, last month.

We held our first couple of PD Sessions events in June. At the first, Kate Tarling explained why it's not enough just to have high-performing delivery teams in parts of an organisation – we have to change how things work across the whole business if we want to deliver better services by default. You can see the event here and read a summary here.

Then last week, Elizabeth Stuart, Executive Director at Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford talked about themes from her book Driving digital transformation: Lessons from seven developing countries. The video will be available soon.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Our latest blog posts

Bringing digital skills to public purpose organisations, Katherine Wastell

Handling a data breach at Public Digital, Matt Harrington

Why user needs must inform business goals, Katherine Wastell

Show The Thing: Better government platforms, better digital services – a write-up of our first event

Observations from the World Bank and IMF spring meetings, James Stewart

Hosting the UNDP Ukraine study tour, Amanda Smith, Onyeka Onyekwelu and Christine Draper

PD Sessions: the Service Organisation, Christine Draper and Rosemary Evans

Ways of working

🔍 Alongside Inter-American Development Bank, Public Digital has developed a guide to help organisations in Latin America and the Caribbean's public sector assess their own digital maturity in terms of the organisation's data. The self diagnosis includes areas such as leadership, finance, organisational structure, data and data management, and technology. With their results, organisations will be able to better identify where they need to improve so they can develop a national (or local) data strategy.

👏🏽 Super post by Paul Downey who has recently become Service Owner for the UK’s Find planning and housing data service. Share On becoming a Service Owner with anyone interested in service ownership, product management and data as infrastructure. Hat tip to Paul for publicly: 1. spelling out the team’s purpose: “make data faster” (accountability = good), and 2. giving the team space to try and fail. Includes hard truths (“we’re failing because despite being productive, we’re not being effective”) and takes ownership (“if we’re working on the wrong things, that’s now my fault.”) More of this from leaders please.

👍 Jennifer Pahlka (political advisor and founder of Code America) has written a must-read: ​​Recoding America. Why Government is failing in the Digital Age and how we can do better. Although they’re US-centred, the power hierarchies, silos the and unstoppable government programs that make seemingly simple technology problems a lot harder in real life, will be relatable for anyone who has worked in and around digital government. Reassuring if you’re trying to unpick a failing technology program and wondering why it’s so hard. Inspiring if you want to see policy delivered and better services offered by governments. Glowing recommendation from Public Digital partner Emma too.

👩🏻‍🏫 Got lost down a rabbit hole in the design history on the Becoming a teacher GOV.UK page. Particularly good: Exploring ways to integrate multiple services in the becoming a teacher journey and the explanations for each mission patch are ace. These are superb examples of teams showing their thinking and documenting their decisions. Made me think about Giles Turnbull’s work about How teams remember.

👀 Looks useful: Making the financial case for Service Design is a new course from Clara Greo and PD network member Ignacia Orellana. Learning how to frame the risk of *not* doing service design feels particularly important.

State of technology

💭 Essential reading: Jess Morley from Oxford Internet Institute published a guide to Thinking critically about AI in healthcare. Here’s Jess’ thread on data aka AI’s ‘main ingredient’. Particularly noteworthy: “providing access to the volumes of well-structured, well-curated, health data required to train high-performing and accurate AI/ML models is very challenging”, suggesting, we’re a way off massive change. Medicine is a highly-regulated industry, it also has a long history of ethical governance (see page 26), but how might regulations and ethics play into AI in the future?

🗣️ Which languages dominate the internet? No prizes for guessing. Weirdly though, languages like Bengali and Urdu are each spoken by hundreds of millions of people, yet they are nearly impossible to find on the internet. Rest of World worked with web-scanning firm W3Techs to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Super interesting plus great data visualisation.

🙄 Fairwork just published a report on Gender and Platform Work. It shows research done over 4 years, in 38 countries and across 180 platforms. The Guardian has a decent write up here but essentially, the gig economy fails women around the world – unsafe conditions, sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination are rife. Stand-out line from report author Dr Anjali Krishan: ​​“So much of it is just the platform not listening to the women. They’d rather come up with a very complicated algorithmic solution." Really disturbing.

💀 Apple keeps trying to fix its users by Intelligencer is a funny piece despite the Black Mirror element. On the mindfulness app and the set of tools for improving users’ vision health launched at its June event, “Apple is helping users help themselves, giving them tips and tricks and tools for managing modern life,” writes John Herrman. “Then, after a beat, Tim Cook returned to the stage to deliver the punchline in the form of an all-new product: the Vision Pro, a $3,500 computer that straps directly to your face.” 🤦 Big Tech playing with us.

Digital government

✅ Bravo to the City of Edinburgh Council who are going to provide an alternative intranet access platform for employees. It’ll provide access to crucial information for people working in areas such as social services, waste management, parks and housing who are not office-based and don't have corporate email addresses. Nice levelling up.

💰 As part of our joint Digital Public Finance Hub, Cathal Long from ODI and Public Digital’s programme manager Nick Gates are doing monthly updates that pull out trends from the intersection of digital and public finance. Here’s the latest update – it’s excellent in itself but also links to loads of other good stuff.

💡 The Institute for Public Policy Research has published A new playbook for public service reform. TL;DR: nice summary here from one of the authors Harry Quilter-Pinner.

🇦🇺 Good to see the Australian government is bringing in a fleet of electric vehicles for parliamentarians, the Governor-General, the federal judiciary and international guests of the government. Savings in running costs, including fuel and maintenance are expected.

🧠 Good on Camden Council for thinking outside the stuffy, old, rigid box that local councils are often trapped by. They're bringing in Moral Imaginations to try Transformation through ‘imagination activism’. “Imagination can help energise a new kind of activism which focuses on imagining how things could be, and implementing the changes needed to get there, rather than fighting and resisting how things are.” Focus on outcomes. Good.