A measure of value for digital public service delivery
A measure of value for digital public service delivery User need: outcomes for people, their representatives or communities
Policy intent: meeting explicit outcomes sought by politicians or ones implicit in legislation
Capability to operate: building a collegiate team, unpicking legacy software or answering a knotty technical question
Product leadership in the public sector is, more often than not, about balancing these 3 things.
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Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government
Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government Short talk from the tail-end of last year that I gave to the Administrative Fairness Lab’s webinar on the Energy Crisis, Fuel Poverty, and Administrative Fairness on digital means testing *
* Not a judgement on if means-testing is good/bad and the social implications therein
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Government service design: outcomes and ‘fairness’?
Would it be ok if a digital public service makes it simple for users to achieve a proximate outcome (get a widget licence, apply for a widget support allowance, pay widget tax, appeal a widget removal order etc) if the process feels less than fair? Or if the rules are opaque, inconsistent or unknowable? If it’s unclear who is making a decision and why? If no one has designed how it feels to interact with the procedures and processes that sit around it?
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Dyslexia
I recently came across my assessment for dyslexia from when I was 14. My mum had been fairly ruthless at decluttering, but she’d kept that, a source of vindication I think.
I thought I’d write a couple of notes about it - partly because misunderstandings about dyslexia abound (even from people whose job it is to communicate clearly), mostly as something to point people at to explain what it is like in my case.
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The limits of simple
I came across this paragraph in a review of the work of Elinor Ostrom:
The better services are, as defined by professional criteria, the less satisfied the citizens are with those services'. This paradox emerges when the evaluation of the production process focuses solely on the part provided by the regular producer, ignoring the part played by the consumer-producer. Consequently, in such cases, the co-production trade-off is drifting away from its optimum and the interaction between the two parts is becoming more and more defective, despite genuine efforts to improve the service.
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Subsidising R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants
A good summary of what happens when cloud companies come for an open-source project, in this case Mapbox
Mapbox found themselves in a similar position to Mongo and Redis: they were subsidizing R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants.
Once upon a time, I really thought you could give away your trade secrets and still be successful. I thought the scale of the internet had enabled a new genre of company that could become massive despite only capturing an infinitesimally small fraction of the value they created.
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Composite services are here
Originally published at https://richardpope.orgon August 26, 2021.
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Service marginalia
It strikes me that Apple’s privacy labels ….
… are the same class of thing as …
… scribblings in the margins of a service that give context, help build a bigger picture about the ecosystem the service operates in, provide escape routes when things go wrong, or surface the rules that govern its use.
Digital design in the public sector doesn’t really make space for things like these. That’s hard to do if the design ethos is minimalist or reductive (which are generally good approaches if you are designing for task completion, maybe less so for signposting recourse or explaining who operates a service and how they do it).
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How this thing works
These two plastic scoops came packaged with our dog’s food. It’s one of those monthly subscription services and the scoops came in the welcome pack. The food is dehydrated, you mix it one-to-one with water before serving it. One scoop is blue (for water), and one is yellow (for the dried food). But the scoops are the same size and have a volume of 4 tablespoons (save a millimetre or two).
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Building public services with digital public goods
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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Institutions for the long-term
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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A transparency stack for digital public goods
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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From products to digital public goods
If digital public goods are going to have the effects hoped for, there will need to be clear routes for their creation, maintenance and adoption. Otherwise, there is a risk of ‘performative openness’, where source code is published in the hope that it is reused. Or because it is seen as the ‘right thing to do’.
So, what might the routes be for creating digital public goods that meet genuine user needs?
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Open-source and platform behaviours in digital public goods
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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Digital public goods as infrastructure: government as a platform for all?
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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Exploring digital public goods — introduction
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.
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15 questions for the future of digital practice in government
Originally published at https://richardpope.orgon May 24, 2021.
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How many project management paradigms do you have in your organisation?
How many project management paradigms do you have in your organisation?
If you are trying to do upfront design upfront and iteration, you probably 1 have a problem.
If you have fixed deadlines and fixed scope, you probably have a problem.
If you are trying to centrally control of design and technology, and delegate decision making to teams, then you probably have a problem.
If you are trying to work in an agile way and using waterfall governance processes (or vice versa), you probably have a problem.
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Public interest technology and covid data - whose job is it?
Lockdown rules differ across the UK and are set by different, overlapping layers of government - UK, devolved, local. The result is it’s hard to understand what the current rules are for any given location. GOV.UK lists the rules for England, set by the UK government only, not those set by the devolved administrations or local authorities.
Business over a certain size have been made to write risk assessments about the measures they are taking to keep staff and the public safe.
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Public interest technology and covid data — who’s job is it?
Originally published at https://richardpope.orgon August 6, 2020.
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