PD Newsletter #68: The Queen, the queue and the Whatsapp work-arounds

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

It’s been an interesting few weeks in the UK, regardless of your view on Queen Elizabeth II 👑 Many obituaries failed to mention that the late queen was a digital pioneer having sent her first email in 1976. 📧 The queue to pay one’s respects at the Palace of Westminster stretched for miles. Loved this piece by Steph Gray who built the queue tracker tool that helped people find the end of it. Proof of concept to launch in 3 days. We accept with good grace that it has given us the “most British bit of internet ever made.”

In other news, we are delighted to be leading a discovery into the barriers to treatment faced by people with sickle cell disease (SCD) for the NHS Race and Health Observatory. We’ll be listening to people’s experience of care and recommending digital products and services to test for impact and scalability. Important work because “there may be no population of patients whose health care and outcomes are more affected by racism than those with SCD” (The New England Journal of Medicine). Last year’s No One's Listening report is essential reading to understand the shocking context.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

✅ Civic designer Suzanne Chapman at United States Digital Service has done a great job of pulling together A quick guide to inclusive design. If you've been working in a digital delivery team for a while, this stuff should be second nature but this is a really solid post to share with stakeholders who are less certain. Fave part: “Stick to information that helps people complete their task. It’s typically not helpful to go into the history of how something came about, or the internal organisation structure.” Very useful.

🖋️ Built for Mars founder Peter Ramsey has published another case study, this time on DocuSign, the e-Signature service. “100 million customers, 1 billion users, across 180 different countries… but can they improve the experience?" Enjoy how Peter picks through the user journeys and presents the pros and cons. If you’re involved in delivering something, imagine your service under this microscope.

📂 Speaking of case studies, keep the Digital Inclusion Navigator in mind. It’s a filterable collection of real-world case studies and leading best practices aimed at helping policymakers make quicker and better sense of overwhelming and siloed information to accelerate digital inclusion. Bravo, Edison Alliance.

🇨🇦 Good read from Sean Boots on the problems with ‘project gating’ where “teams seek approval (one gate at a time) to initiate a project or to get funding”. Sean points out that although it’s designed to prevent expensive IT project failures, “the Canadian government’s most notable IT failures successfully completed a project gating process.” He points to the “incomprehensible failure” of a payment system. Also excellent and also relating to digital public services in Canada: how building an agile organisation is about shifting towards a culture of continuous learning.

🙈 Google Cloud and AWS have recently released carbon usage reports for cloud resources and I enjoyed this snarky, cutting comparison of the 2 by Corey Quinn. TL;DR: “One of these carbon neutrality approaches is indicative of a thoughtful approach to partnering with customers to lead to a better climate story around cloud usage. The other appears to have been phoned in by clowns the night before it was due.” 🔥

🧡 One for the em-dash and en-dash aficionados (of which there are many): The simple visual impact an en-dash can have on a date range. Topical 👑

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Thanks for flagging these free design events, Nia Campbell:

• Emma Parnell – Let's Talk About Sex (28 September)
• What makes a good charity website homepage? (29 September)
• Recognising and avoiding burnout in user-centred design (4 October)

State of technology

🇲🇽 A depressing piece on how women are creating Facebook and Whatsapp groups to share and track each other’s locations in Mexico. Admittedly, the groups can mostly only provide reassurance and the ‘veneer of safety’ because it is very hard to intervene if a member of a group is in danger. Violence against women in the country has increased by 70% in the last 5 years – shame that citizens are relying on tech for security rather than on lackadaisical authorities.

🇺🇬 Recently came across Digital rights are women’s rights – a guide supporting women's organisations to get involved in the digital rights movement. It's compiled by Pollicy, a group of technologists, data scientists, creatives and academics looking to innovate government service delivery across Africa. They're based in Uganda. Follow them here. See their newsletter here.

💚 Omidyar Network announced a new initiative: The tech we want. Fifteen ‘digital luminaries’ have been chosen to co-create a vision for “ethical technology, systems, and economies that generate value for all” (plus, the planet). It’s a 4-year, $8 million portfolio of work that hopes to connect up-and-coming leaders, companies, and technologies that are built on inclusivity, sustainability, and responsible innovation. Watch this space...

🙌 Open UK’s State of open: The UK in 2022 report was published over the summer. Interesting takeaway: the UK spends £4.87 to £5.65 billion on open source software. Public Digital’s James Stewart’s thought leadership piece on the Government Digital Service and our public sector is on page 25. Probably an apt moment to include our report from last year again too: Open source in government: creating the conditions for success.

🏆 Related: our friends at United Nations Development Programme are sponsoring the Future of Government Awards alongside AWS Institute and Apolitical. The emphasis is on open source innovation in the public sector because it’s important to recognise that “no country or region has a monopoly on good ideas.” Go forth, nominate.

Digital government

🇳🇮 A story of resistance via Whatsapp in Nicaragua where the president, Daniel Ortega is trying to rid the country entirely of independent media. Despite some of the slowest mobile internet connections in the world, about half the population use WhatsApp and 10,000 people subscribe to notifications from La Prensa, a prominent Nicaraguan news outlet in exile. Journalists and citizen journalists are heavily reliant on the Whatsapp disappearing messages function.

🇯🇵 Since Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono was appointed last month, he’s declared war on floppy discs and tweeted sarcastically about the use of fax machines in “our remarkably advanced society”. Fighting talk. Sounds like the right person to accelerate digital transformation – will he be able to weather the anticipated opposition from bureaucrats?

💰 In a post on how much the Canadian government spends on IT contracts, Sean Boots (him again!) introduces govcanadacontracts.ca, a research website that breaks down spend data by vendor, by department, by category, and overall across government. (Spoiler: it spent $4.6 billion in the last fiscal year). Reminded me of this toolkit by The Open Contracting Partnership which is designed to help buying organisations "rethink sustainable public procurement through an open, data-driven, inclusive approach.” Twitter thread here.

🇦🇺 A safer, more centralised Australian internet is a post by Mark Nottingham that explores what the Industry Codes that are being proposed to the country’s e-Safety Commissioner will do to the Australian internet. A good example of how easy it is for regulation to break the things that made the internet brilliant in the first place.

🇹🇼 Keep an eye on the Innovative Minds with Audrey Tang series. In the latest episode, the Digital Minister of Taiwan speaks to democracy activist Pia Mancini. Key quote: “democratic institutions must move with the times. Augmented, innovative digital approaches and human-centred design can ‘democratise democracy’.”

News from Public Digital

On the Public Digital blog

• Postcard from Tokyo, Andrew Greenway