Public Digital #80 Nominate smart folk and meaningful work

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

If you know an individual or team doing brilliant, meaningful work in the global public sector digital transformation space, you can nominate them for an award at the Future of Government Awards. Raising them up and sharing their story will encourage conversations. And – in the very best case scenario – it could lead to code reuse which saves time, effort and taxpayers’ money.

We’re thrilled to be sponsoring the awards alongside our friends at UNDP and AWS Institute.

Nominate Digital advocates – celebrate a small team that has had a great impact
Nominate an Open source creation – celebrate an open source solution with demonstrable potential for reuse.
Nominate an Open source adaptation – celebrate an open-source solution that has been adapted by applying it in a different setting.
Nominate a Leader – celebrate someone who has enabled real positive change.

Amy

🚀 Forwarded this email? Sign-up.

Latest from Public Digital

✌️ News

As individuals we’ve been part of online communities since Day Dot. Remember CompuServe “where all the grumpy Brits hung out” according to Partner Tom – he still has scars from overseeing BBC message boards 20 years ago. Since we became Public Digital we’ve found a lot of value in the social media communities we’re part of. They’ve helped us work in the open, connect with like-minded people, encourage conversation, and hold ourselves to account. We thrive on this stuff. Unfortunately, at the moment, Twitter is not a platform which encourages the respectful, tolerant behaviours we hold dear so we won’t be posting from our account for the foreseeable. That said, we're still very active on LinkedIn and, like many of you, we’re trying out Bluesky (@publicdigital.bsky.social). See you over there.

👋🏿 Events

PD Sessions
5 December – All I want for Christmas: Our wishlist for cities, digital and data. Sign up to join in person or online

Show the thing
🇳🇬 14 November – Show The Thing Nigeria. Presented by Sarah Esangbedo Ajose-Adeogun
🇲🇬 21 November – Show The Thing Madagascar. Presented by Dimbinirina Razafindramanana and Mickaël Andriamiajarisoa
🇨🇦 29 November – Show The Thing Nova Scotia, Canada. Presented by Erik Hermans and Gab Kelly

👀 Blog posts and a podcast

The long read: Changing how we change in the public sector, Audree Fletcher
We have joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance, James Stewart
Future of Government Awards: Nominations are open, James Stewart and Amy McNichol. Read in Spanish here and read in French here.
How to bring public financial management into the digital era, Nicholas Gates and Cathal Long from ODI at the ICT Works blog
Dan Abadie talks about his experience leading digital strategies in government in Liderando estrategias de gobierno digital: casa de Argentina, Futuro Público podcast

Ways of working

🚗 Spurious detail, false certainty – we need to get more comfortable with "just enough" by Public Digital director Audree Fletcher is one to bookmark and share. This one will be good for stakeholders who are planning-obsessed and prematurely thirsty for The Detail. Audree uses the analogy of a long car trip to explain which information is useful for someone overseeing a service transformation programme. “A way of gauging progress on the journey, and an update on time/petrol variance against forecast” is enough. Important that she also references the possibility of abandoning a trip entirely if the conditions just aren’t right.

💭 Related: teams working on the UK’s National Health Service app get together every 3 months to share their plans for the next quarter. They’re already identifying dependencies, duplication and areas for collaboration from January to March 2024 because “big ambitions for the future are being defined right now.” Nice bit on principles here: “We all know that things can change between agreeing to do a thing and actually doing it — don’t feel you have to plough on just because a decision was made several months ago.” Echoes Audree’s point.

😆 Grateful to product specialist John Cutler for giving those sprawling, messy pieces of work with loads of limiting constraints that make “our brains hurt a bit more” an authoritative adjective: project-ish. And then, “we have a name for Big Project-ish Projects: Big Messy Projects (BMPs),” he writes. Nice read.

💛 Digital sociologist Lisa Talia Moretti published Designing for a relationship, not a user last year but it’s still relevant. “As more public services and national infrastructure, like single sign-on accounts and identity, move online, the design of informal and formal support journeys will need to move from nice-to-have into the territory of accessible and inclusive design practice.” Makes us think about how much there is to learn by looking at how people have solved challenges in very different contexts, such as vastly different levels of internet access. More in-depth thinking here.

🦜 Not new news but nice to have a relatively long read on the Smart-talk trap – “an especially insidious inhibitor of organisational action.” Harvard Business School defines smart talkers as sounding confident, being eloquent, having interesting information and ideas but expressing themselves in unnecessarily complicated ways whilst focusing on the negative (“Pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial,” – Professor Teresa Amabile). The piece identifies 5 things the best organisations do – the emphasis being on just that: doing. For example, leaders who also do the doing; creating processes that get stuff done; prioritising asking how so that ideas can be put in motion. Includes a wealth of examples.

3 time-guzzlers

Something nostalgic: Internet artifacts. FYI, 1982 was the year of the first smiley.
Something cringe: Corporate Bro on tech conferences, and on AI.
Something of an office fave: london.metro-memory.com

State of technology

💔 At the time of publishing there have been 3 total communications outages in the Gaza Strip. This piece from Rest of World discusses blackouts as part of modern-day warfare. It highlights the fragility of the infrastructure we rely on for so much, including for documenting crises. It's shocking how easily it can be taken away and what that means for the voices we hear. Access Now’s Who is shutting down the internet in 2023? is a must-read.

🌍 Start-up Archivi.ng is a digital archive and search engine for every important news story published since Nigeria’s independence in 1960. At the moment, African history is grossly underrepresented on the internet and the lack of data feeds AI bias. Fu’ad Lawal and his team of volunteers are teaching AI about African history by collecting newspapers, tagging them manually, scanning them, and then uploading them on the platform with keywords. “Anybody who has a serious and inclusive AI strategy will have to be looking at digitisation efforts like ours and others from emerging markets,” he says in this interview with Rest of World.

✍️ Related to barely-existent data: National Geographic's piece on how AI is helping to identify enslaved African-Americans in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500s and 1865. The focus is on a collaborative project called 10 Million Names which aims to amplify the voices of people who have been telling their family stories for centuries, and connect researchers and data partners. The hope is to eventually expand access to data and information on people whose existence simply wasn’t documented outside of receipts.

😍 This is a cool page on Big problems that demand bigger energy. MIT Technology Review asks scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, activists, and CEOs to identify which problems at the intersection of technology and society they think we should focus more energy on. Nothing wildly surprising but nice nonetheless.

Digital government

📼 Another well-researched piece from Coda: The smart city where everybody knows your name gives a stark snapshot of the pros and cons of Aqkol in Kazakhstan as it becomes a smart city. It’s interview-heavy. One resident says “I don’t know why we need this – we barely have roads and running water,” while another is grateful that cameras have been installed because she gets less hassle from groups of men. Analysts say the beginnings of a smart city marks the beginning of Chinese-style public surveillance systems (the hardware is Chinese). Interestingly, since the start of the Ukraine war, Kazakhstan has shifted away from Russia and strengthened its relationship with China. Rock. 🇰🇿 Hard place.

🇺🇸 US President Biden has announced an Executive Order on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI to “ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI”. One of the ways he plans to do this is by “accelerating the rapid hiring of AI professionals” and speeding up visa processes to bring AI experts/researchers into the US asap. Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence department has put together the most notable takeaways but essentially the order looks comprehensive and credible. Implementation on the other hand will be challenging and places demands and relatively short deadlines on agencies. And of course, there’s the small matter of the upcoming presidential election.

🔬 Meanwhile, the United Nations has created an advisory body to address AI governance. It will issue initial recommendations by the end of the year and final recommendations by the summer of 2024. It builds on July’s briefing by the UN Secretary General on AI in the Security Council.

🇲🇽 Following in the footsteps of Buenos Aires and its 2021 efforts, Mexico City has developed a Care Indicator System. It’s about time receiving and giving care is becoming recognised as a fundamental part of achieving gender equality. Of course, reliable data is essential to show how care tasks are distributed through statistical and administrative data. Read the case study here from Open Data Charter, one of the partners involved in creating the system. Spanish speakers can also watch a discussion around the importance of the initiative at its launch.