PD Newsletter #79: Recognise great teams and meaningful work

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

PD's been out and about recently as events season is in full swing.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Our latest blog posts

❌ Preparing for the next UK general election. As Andrew's presence at the Labour conference shows, we've been thining about how PD can best contribute in the run-up to the UK's elections next year. Andrew shares some of what we're up to.

👀 Show the Thing is back! Onyeka Onyekwelu. We have 2 events in the next few weeks:

🙌🏽 PD Sessions: Digital and democracy, Andrew Greenway

Ways of working

👏🏾 Brilliant as always from agile comms specialist Giles Turnbull on Weeknotes rules. Many teams who are beginning to work in the open (probably all teams, everywhere actually) say they suffer from comms overload and, if there’s a reluctance to start weeknotes, it’s often because people don’t want to add to colleagues’ unread email tally. Weeknotes shouldn’t be seen as compulsory reads though. Giles says “every team must publish them. But nobody must read everything.” Essentially, it’s working in the open and making information easily accessible. That's the important bit. Read the post to uncover the superpowers that weeknotes enable.

🇨🇦 Ace to see ex-Public Digital colleague Laura Nelson-Hamilton continuing to think out loud. Prototyping approaches to policy prototyping is a hope-filled post. She’s excited about “the recent emergence of policy prototyping as a dedicated function in the Ontario Public Service,” however, she doesn’t know of a “jurisdiction in the world that has harmonised its design process and policy development lifecycles, and unified these as inputs into an overall approach to funding delivery.” And in this post on assumptions she offers the explanation that bringing policy into step with new approaches to design would be “a whole entire undertaking” and that’s why historically, teams haven’t tested policy as part of digital service delivery. Reminder?

💪🏼 This Prototyping in the browser for content designers course is brought to you by a dreamteam: content design agency Crocstar and interaction designer/ frontend developer Frankie Roberto. The aim? Essentially to give content designers more autonomy to present their content as it will be experienced by users leading to quicker, more appropriate design decisions. Looks super useful.

😍 Working in this space can be tough and feel pretty thankless at times but this Appreciation workshop from PD director Katherine Wastell is a glorious way to keep chins up/ restore morale. It’s basically a structured and non-cringe way for us to tell teammates and colleagues what we appreciate about them. Good looking Miro template included.

🏃 Found myself nodding along to this from user researcher Thomas Smee in BT’s Design team: Improve your design sprints by giving your user researchers a head start. Thomas says that making a standard 5-day design sprint 7 days long meant their sprint was based on validated user needs rather than on assumptions. The heads up also meant there was time to recruit participants to test with during the sprint.

State of technology

🇸🇳 A good news story from Rest of World: How WhatsApp voice notes are revolutionising farming in Senegal. Sending voice notes has increased collaboration across the farming industry in Senegal – a country where nearly half the population cannot read or write. (Side note: this is less to do with illiteracy and more to do with most people there speaking Wolof, Pulaar, or Diola which are primarily oral, not written). Presumably just a happy accident rather than a desire to meet the needs of this specific user group (though it'd be fascinating to hear if we're wrong?) Nice to be able to shout about a positive unintended consequence for once.

😡 Love this from content designer Nadia Huq: Is ChatGPT amplifying bias against female experts? “Why did I have to prompt ChatGPT to consider gender balance in the first place?” she asks. Answer: data is biassed (and reflects human bias). Nadia then looks at: 1. How might ChatGPT improve feedback loops so users can call out bias? And 2. How might ChatGPT respond responsibly to queries to fully “acknowledge that certain groups are often discriminated against and this could affect ChatGPT’s responses?” Includes a rabbit hole of links too.
🤯 Also AI-related: using AI to translate *and* sync your lips. Woah. Tweeted 12 September so forgive what is basically old news in terms of the head-spinning pace of AI.

🤣 Enjoyed this on Why your phone made a horrible sound this afternoon. Spoiler: it was a US-wide test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. Citizens were warned to avoid nasty surprises (remember Hawaii’s false missile alert?) which meant anti vaxxers could dream up some real tasty conspiracy theories. For example, the sound would “activate graphene oxide particles implanted in people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, thus activating the Marburg virus, which will cause hundreds of millions of us to suffer hemorrhagic fevers.” Golden.

💰 Back in the real world, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a case accusing Amazon of using its monopoly position in online retail to suppress competition. “According to some estimates, Amazon controls about half of the US’s online-shopping market,” writes journalist Sheelah Kolhatkar. The piece explains why even though Amazon quite often offers consumers the lowest price, the “titan of twenty-first century commerce” poses longer-term threats that must be taken seriously.

Digital government

🌏 Victor Dominello, Former Member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, says that “Digital can no longer be exclusively a playground for geeks – leaders need to understand its opportunities and challenges,” he says. How? By preparing them better. He’s working with Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) to create a digital credential, aimed at secretary and deputy-secretary level, to build knowledge around modern digital government, and citizen-centric and place-based design. The credential will be aimed at public sector leaders across Australia and New Zealand looking to modernise their agencies. Express your interest here.

🇬🇧 Here’s an update on GOV.UK Forms – an online form builder which can be used to make accessible and easy to use digital forms for GOV.UK. It’s still in private beta but is opening up to a wider pool of users. Such an important piece of work – it saves time for departments that are processing form submissions, and time for users that are filling in forms. Get notified when Forms is available for all central government departments.

🤔 Another positive yet provocative piece from Sean Boots about why sometimes, the people in charge can’t change things either. He acknowledges the frustrations and offers 5 strategies to try, my favourite of which is: “Gather and publicly disseminate data (the more embarrassing the better)” because creating external pressure to implement systemic changes can work. Likely the case for most huge organisations, not just the Canadian Civil Service.

🇨🇦 Aaron Snow has published a piece on how Canada's new Citizen Services ministry can benefit from Ukraine's success in becoming a truly digital government. “it will take more than a new minister and a change to the org chart,” he says and goes on to praise the bold approaches that Ukraine (and the UK) took to digital government. Good luck to Terry Beech, the new Minister of Citizens’ Services.