PD Newsletter #77: Internet cafes, simple sabotage and microaggressions

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Last month Public Digital welcomed 15 female leaders who are involved in Ukraine’s digital transformation. We were thrilled to partner with UNDP Ukraine to design and deliver a 3-day study tour that brought the group together with some of the leading UK public sector digital teams for talks and informal discussions on challenges and triumphs. Quick write up here.

We’re running more What Works Cities sprints for people working in city governments in North, Central or South America. The aim is to help local governments improve their use of data to inform policy decisions, equitably improve services and engage residents.

Registration for our next Sprints is open now for city staff working with data. Sign up for:

• Data and algorithmic governance and ethics starting on 12 September
• Running a live data/analytics service starting on 5 October
• Making decisions with data starting on 16 January

Thanks to our partners Results for America and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Our latest blog posts

Transforming access to public services for Madagascar’s citizens, Joanne Esmyot

Driving digital transformation in 7 developing countries, Blessing Ajimoti and Rosemary Evans

5 lessons from studying digital approaches to PFM, Kit Weaver

What Public Digital thinks about AI: the long read, Dave Rogers

Show The Thing 3: Taiwan's T-Road - an integrated data transfer platform

Ways of working

🕵🏽 Organisational self-sabotage from Public Digital director Audree Fletcher is a write-up of an activity she often uses with organisations we work with. It’s inspired by the US authorities’ 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual – a guide distributed to rebel citizens in Axis powers countries aimed at reducing productivity in the workplace. Examples: “Hold meetings when there is more critical work to be done” it advises. “Apply all regulations to the last letter,” it urges. How obstructive. When working with new teams, Audree introduces the field manual and asks how they might sabotage their organisation’s digital transformation. Nice. Subversive! Then she flips it: what about preventive measures? Calling out unhelpful behaviours means they are at the forefront of the team’s mind just before creating and committing to their transformation vision. Clever.

💰 Shopify’s ‘no meeting Wednesdays’ made headlines earlier in the year but they’ve now built a meeting cost calculator tool in-house. It’s only available internally (it’s tailored specifically to their operations) but Levels.fyi has a decent tool here and our friend Sean Boots did something similar back in 2017 when he joined the Canadian Digital Service. Enjoyed this piece from Quartz that takes completely reimagining meetings even further.

👍 Good to see Adur District and Worthing Borough Councils adopting the services-centric matrix organisation model. Chief Executive Catherine Howe has written about the process of creating a new organisational design and operating model that will “better reflect and allow us to deliver on the ambitions of Our Plan.”

💭 The Micropedia is a collaborative community project aimed at collecting “everyday microaggressions and highlighting their harmful impact through source-based definitions and real-world examples.” Categories include 2SLGBTQ+, class, indigenous. Bookmark this if you care about writing and designing for inclusivity.

State of technology

There’s a risk this section could become completely about AI these days so here’s:

🙌 The good: Catching up on the weird world of large language models by Simon Willison is an ace AI explainer. Share it far and wide.
😬 The bad: In Latin America, where investment money is scarce for early stage startups, founders are finding it hard to integrate AI tools on a budget. There are questions around equity and a danger of stifling innovation.
🤔 The jury’s out: Is ChatGPT getting dumber? TL;DR: many users are convinced it is but comprehensively testing it is seriously difficult. Might the new AI subscription service that Microsoft announced last month indicate a change in priority and provide an explanation?
🖤 The Public Digital take: AI is flawed, experimental, but ripe with potential for disruption: for good and ill. Partner Dave Rogers’ long read looks beyond the hype, and founding partner Tom Loosemore posted about how your organisation can thrive in the AI era.

🧑‍💻 Enough of AI. Remember when internet cafes represented The Future instead? Here’s a fantastic piece on the world’s last internet cafes complete with superb photographs from places in Uganda, Nepal, Mexico, Nigeria, Argentina and China. In a “post-Cold War moment full of techno-optimism… sharing a global resource like the internet was going to bring different people in different cultures together in mutual understanding.” The Guardian predicted cyber cafes’ demise in 2004 when smartphones were within touching distance for many. Hundreds of places in Asia reinvented themselves as gaming cafes and Mexico City’s internet cafes double as day-care centres.

🤮 Lastly, Musk challenging Zuckerberg to a cage fight following the rumours about Meta launching Threads and the innumerable memes that followed made me think of Dr Ella Fitzsimmons’ talk on the danger of creating hero narratives around men like these. She gave the talk in 2018. Have we learnt nothing? Pleased to see WWF using Musk’s ‘X’ drama to make a poignant point in its latest advert with a nod to the Twitter bird’s ‘Xtinction’.

Digital government

🌆 New data institutions are the key to London’s growth is a good piece on the need for institutional reform to unlock innovation by one of our founding partners Mike Bracken. “The benefits of free-flowing data at individual, city and national level are enormous” he says. But “a generation of poorly planned outsourcing of our public technology systems means the old school technology industry ‘owns’ much of our data and restricts its use to solve policy issues.” It’s well worth revisiting Jeni Tennison's post that explains Why cities need analytics and data services.

💔 Inside New Mexico’s struggle to protect kids from abuse is a heartbreaking example of a ‘Structured Decision Making safety tool’ that has not been designed for the service it sits within or the policies it is meant to support. “It doesn’t always convey how much danger kids are truly facing,” says child welfare worker Ivy Woodward. But “for strained child welfare agencies, algorithms and risk assessment tools are an attractive solution to the vexing challenge of maintaining consistent decision-making practices.”

🇰🇪 Last month, Kenya's government fought off a huge cyber-attack that had been affecting services on the country’s eCitizen platform for almost a week. It highlighted the vulnerabilities and risks to everyday business and service transactions. It’s not the first time the Kenyan Government has been targeted: Chinese hackers attacked them in May too. Raises questions around whether it is learning from repeated attacks, what other countries could learn, and how widespread disruption impacts people's access to public services and their trust in digital.