policy – Dave Briggs

LINK: “Making public policy in the digital age”

When the policy is broken, the service fails. And when the service fails, trust in the institution providing the service diminishes. More often that not, high-profile breakdowns are seized upon as a failures of technology or implementation. The truth is that policy is often the culprit.

Original: https://medium.com/digitalhks/making-public-policy-in-the-digital-age-1900a248578c

Five for Friday (29/9/17)

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Five for Friday took a little break for a month or so while I settled into my new job(s). If I’m honest, I am still not completely settled – it takes time getting used to a little portfolio having concentrated on a single role for several years – but I am getting there.

Enjoy the links.

Mapping service design and policy design – terrific post by Andrea Siodmok on how service design and policy design meet. Quite a lot of the focus on digital transformation misses out the policy element, and understanding what an organisation’s approach to an issue, and why it has that approach, is vital to defining services that deliver the intended outcome.
Digital transformation, or digital fossilisation? – good stuff from Andrew Larner talking about the need to use the opportunity of digital transformation to address big strategic issues around the manner in which organisations operate – not just hard baking inefficient and user unfriendly processes using new technology.
Defining Aggregators – you are probably bored of me banging on about Ben Thompson and how good he is, but this is another great piece, pulling together his recent thinking on digital operating models, diving deep into the concept of the aggregator. Now, the aggregator model might not be a good fit for public services, but it’s a great way to get thinking about this operating model malarky.
Designing for democracy – Catherine Howe applies the ladder of participation model to designing services in the digital age. Making this activity democratic involves the political, of courses, and also links up with Andrea’s post linked to above, where understanding the political and policy context is vital to achieving desired outcomes. There’s loads and loads in here (like does an iterative approach mean the big picture can get missed?) and it needs a good read and mull.
YC’s Essential Startup Advice – always take stuff like this with a pinch of salt (one shouldn’t ignore the pervasive Silicon Valley ideology that startups will save the world) but there’s some really good advice in here about launching new services. Much of it focuses on keeping things small and not worrying about scale until you know you have a thing that enough people like to require scale.

As always, these have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

You can also sign up to get them delivered to you by email, if that’s your thing.

Five for Friday (30/6/17)

Quite a mixture of stuff this week – plenty to dig into over the weekend.

Interesting job at GDS, promoting the use of gov.uk Verify in local government. You have until the end of Sunday 2nd July to apply – so better get cracking if you fancy it. If you’re on the lookout for a digital-ish job, then I’d thoroughly recommend Matt Jukes’ weekly listing.
Startup SaaS Stack – this is a nice way of looking at the small number of software as a service tools that a new organisation might need to have. Not just relevant to startups but any organisations – certainly community, voluntary and charity groups could look at this and get a cutting edge tech stack in place in minutes and almost no cash. It also is an effective introduction to thinking about capabilities rather than systems in planning what technology you need.
User-centred digital strategy – a really nice set of slides from Sophie Dennis that explains why strategy is helpful and what good and bad strategy looks like. While you’re there, why not check out her other deck on ‘Adventures in policy land’ which looks at service design in government, and is equally excellent (both via Strategic Reading).
Paul Maltby followed up the crowd sourced reading list that I shared last week with three posts on how digital teams and policy teams can work better together, titled ‘A short guide to policy for government digital professionals‘, ‘What digital and policy can learn from each other‘ and ‘Prototyping a One Team Government manifesto‘. All are worth reading and mulling over.
Who is responsible for effective, efficient and secure digital government? – watch the video of a wide ranging discussion of the progress made in digitising government. There’s more on the Institute for Government’s work in this area in this blog post, including a link to their report on the topic. I think it’s pretty clear to most people that the wave of enthusiasm for the work of the GDS in particular seems to be waning, not least following the departure of a number of leaders from that team, but also as they start to get stuck into some of the more intractable problems around culture and the back office IT stack. I’d argue that what is needed is not so much management, or even leadership (whatever the hell that is) but authority – someone or some people with the mandate to make change happen and the ability to force it through when bureaucratic (on the government side) and kleptocratic (on the vendor side) intertia starts kicking in.

These have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Enyo JavaScript Application Framework – "Use the same framework to develop apps for the web and for all major platforms, desktop and mobile."
Features | Re-usable Drupal recipes for government websites – Nice New Zealand government site sharing open source compontents for Drupal for gov webbies
Consultation Principles – guidance | Cabinet Office – "…the Government is improving the way it consults by adopting a more proportionate and targeted approach, so that the type and scale of engagement is proportional to the potential impacts of the proposal."
Inviting comments on a draft bill | Stephen Hale – "With a public commitment to feed the comments that we receive directly into the process of parliamentary scrutiny via the team working on the bill, we’re effectively enabling people to publicly contribute to the drafting of law."
The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search – A rare thing indeed – an interesting and genuinely useful post about search engine optimisation! Who would have thought that such a thing was even possible!?!?!

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Integrate Your Apps | Zapier – Sync the Web – An ifttt for business web applications. Potentially vey handy.
What Organizations Can Learn from "If This Then That" (IFTTT) – Nice post from Nick Charney on ifttt – which I wrote about the other day
Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People – "Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People"
Don’t forget about ePetitions – they can be part of a more collaborative future – "There is a massive cultural resonance to a democratic mechanism like petitioning – maybe we could think about using this cultural resonance and familiarity in a more innovative and open way."
Is regular door knocking a must for councillors? – "(An alternative title for this entry could be, ‘If I go looking for problems, I’m bound to find some’.)"

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Nelson Mandela Digital Archives – "Our aim is to locate, document, digitise, and provide access to all archival materials related to Nelson Mandela. This is a work in progress. Here is a selection of materials arranged in exhibits for your enjoyment."
Talk About Local » Developments in UK hyperlocal scene – "It’s a great few days for the UK hyperlocal scene as several blue chip organisations reveal new projects."
Control issues around social media in local government – "I would argue that in terms of capability maturity, most local governments are just starting up the ladder and it would be more effective to focus on a few key controls and use a bit of common sense, and allow for a lot of process improvement and lessons to be learned"
The Digital Engagement Guide | Ideas and practical help to use digital and social media in the public sector – "Ideas and practical help to use digital and social media in the public sector"
WE LIKE: Ideas for a good Facebook page timeline « The Dan Slee Blog – "It’s the easiest thing in the world to create a Facebook page. It’s a lot harder to do it effectively."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

cpsrenewal.ca by Nick Charney: Mapping Internal Policy to the Hype Cycle – "I've been thinking a lot this week about how organizations issue policies to govern the use of new and emerging technologies."
The BBC Micro can still teach us a lot – "The BBC Micro taught a generation of teenagers the joys of programming. It's time to re-engineer such a revolution"
Amazon v. Apple « LRB blog – "Readers might be revelling in the lower prices they find on Amazon, but if the books they’re buying are ever less worth reading, it doesn’t seem much of a bargain."
What is Dart? – O’Reilly Radar – "Dart [is] an open-source project that aims to enable developers to build more complex, highly performant apps for the modern web."
MIT App Inventor – "To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a professional developer. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Getting the digital debate going – Jimmy Leach announces the FCO's conference on cyberspace. Sounds interesting!
Mid year review: the state of DH digital – Great honest review of activity in digital at the Dept Health
Ofsted Parent View – Interesting "Parent's Opinion" style school feedback site from Ofsted.
Staff, social media policies and managing risk – Good stuff from Simon Wakeman on the need for organisations to have a clear approach to social media and networking.
Trimming the long tail – the danger of stripping back our websites – Interesting addition to the debate around the top task focus on local government websites.
Introduction to Databases – Stanford University – Free online course. Interesting!
Thinktanks are in crisis. To survive, they must become ‘do tanks’ – "For thinktanks to be effective, they must be imaginative and radical. But a funding crisis is making them increasing bland."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.