digital

Find and reuse digital service elements is a website put together by some folk at the Ministry of Justice that signposts the user to examples of publicly available guidance and patterns for digital work.

Am not entirely sure what I think about it. Obviously it’s a lovely thing to have done, and the world is no worse for it existing, but I’m not sure just how reusable some of these artefacts are in the real world. Certainly the tagline – “Building public services together – one reusable block at a time” – feels a bit of a stretch.

I newsletterred.

Rachel Coldicutt – There’s no such thing as a universal digital service:

In a world where Meta has more users than most countries have residents, it seems odd to say that digital services aren’t universal – but universal services need to work for everyone, not just for people who are digitally connected.

Martin Wright – Mapping is thinking:

We often treat maps as deliverables – neat, tidy artefacts to show what we’re building. But the value of mapping isn’t in the artefact; the value of mapping is in getting there. The process of making the map is what helps us think, collaborate and move a problem forwards.

Really good post this from Duncan Brown – Design by cliché:

But what “booking” means can vary wildly from service to service. Two thirds of breast screening appointments are administered via mobile vans. This is a different, and differently-complex, sense of “booking” from clinic-based appointments, and different in turn from “booking” a vaccination in a community pharmacy.

These “bookings” have little more in common than a name. And indeed that is exactly what teams at the Ministry of Justice found when they tried to standardise “bookings” for prisons.

I’ve done some thinking around this stuff and agree that saying things like “case management should be the same whether it’s adult social care or housing” is a bit daft. Likewise – bookings in my experience are often best developed using components at a layer of abstraction down – forms, payment, resource management, notifications, etc.

Words like booking, reporting, applying work well as service patterns, a layer of abstraction up from the technical gubbins. It’s still helpful to use them to help service designers and tech folk to speak a common language, but not so helpful for the techs putting together a platform of components.

Transforming public services for a modern Wales [PDF warning]:

If Wales wants to rise to the challenge of improving public services, we have to change how we design and deliver them.

That means putting people first, adopting modern and open ways of working, drawing on the best digital practices to build services that are simple, efficient, and designed around real life-needs.

Better tech won’t make joining the indieweb easier, but collectives could:

So how do we get more writers off centralised platforms and on to the indieweb? It’s not unsurprising that a tech audience thinks the answer lies in more, better or “easier” tech. But I think it requires a shift in perspective, away from an individualistic call for everyone to “skill up” and work out how to set up their own website. We need to think collectively, and pool resources. Those who can do all this need to help those who can’t.

Lloyd might be interested in this.

More great sharing from Emily Webber – Building Communities of Practice that Amplify the Flow of Learning Across Organisations:

Humans learn the need to connect with others early on; we are born without the ability to look after ourselves, so we need that connection to survive, and that need doesn’t go away throughout our lives.

However, many of our organisations follow hierarchical, siloed organisational charts that discourage people from connecting across them, often split into separate cost centres, budgets and targets. Going against our human nature to connect.