I was supposed to run the Brighton marathon last month, but bug between a charity’s CRM and the marathon meant I didn’t actually have a place. Lots of people very kindly sponsored me, so to make sure I delivered my side of the deal I ran Milton Keynes.
I hadn’t done a very convincing job of training for Brighton because of other commitments. I thought a month more might mean I could make up for that, but that was wishful thinking.
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Administrative Fairness Lab Conference 2025
I was in York for the Administrative Fairness Lab’s conference. Somehow I’ve never visited before.
The photo above is from York Minster’s stone mason yard, cathedral’s being things that are never done.
One of the sessions at the conference, by Maria Lee and Sam Guy was about due process in the planning system. One of the key ideas I took away was that removing things like consultations doesn’t remove the contested viewpoints they exist to air.
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Designing the seams, not seamless design
Designing the seams, not seamless design On YouTube, there’s a compilation of Steve Jobs speeches where he says: ‘It just works. Seamlessly.’ There are forty-four examples in total. ‘It just works’ sums up Jobs’ approach to design: remove and simplify. He thought design should ‘get out of the way’. Products that just worked were not there to be meddled with either (when Apple discovered repair shops opening the iPhone 4, they added tamper-proof screws).
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Standing inside the machine
I was in the Netherlands to deliver a keynote at the User Needs First conference. While I was there I visited the Zaanse Schans open air museum. Windmills and other industrial buildings were transported and reconstructed there in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s also a museum of industry, mostly chocolate and biscuits.
Compared to most preserved windmills in the UK, many of the windmills at Zaanse Schans actually work and it was a very windy day.
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Public sector design — time for a reset
Public sector design — time for a reset Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design.
The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services.
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Public sector design — time for a reset
Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design.
The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services.
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Digital talent and precariousness in government
Given there’s a UK election coming up, there’s going to talk about how to get more tech talent into government. Most is probably going to be encouraging ‘tours of duty’ from the tech industry. That short-term engagements are the way to get people with digital skills in to government. I thoughts I’d share my experience from 2011 on the precariousness that creates.
I originally joined the civil service on a 2 year fixed term as a civil servant.
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Marathon
Originally published at https://richardpope.orgon January 28, 2024.
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Speaker notes: administrative fairness in practice
The following is (approximatly) the talk I gave as part of the Administrative Fairness Lab’s panel at the ESRC Festival of Social Science.
Starting with GOV.UK in 2012, the changes to how the UK government designs and builds digital services over the past decade have been significant. User centered design practice and agile development are now the norm, at least in some form. Digital services are tested with real users throughout the development lifecycle.
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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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