Who governs? Platform privilege, contact tracing and APIs.
Apple and Google have, through the design of their contact tracing APIs, removed choices from democratic governments seeking to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. If (if) a centralised model will lead to better public health outcomes (and some people are a making the case that it is) then their design choices have made this harder. As Peter Wells points out, in creating an arbitrary limit of one-app-per-country, they have also removed the ability to meet different types of need (for example, an app for NHS workers where they can use check-in type design pattern to register that they are on a non-COVID ward, or record the PPE that they are wearing).
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Getting people back into work: ethics, efficacy and trust
Government ministers have a choice about how they use the welfare system to help people who have lost their jobs or businesses get back to work. That choice includes questions of ethics, efficacy and trust.
The working-age welfare system has always existed as a set of rights and responsibilities. Since the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the introduction of Universal Credit, the responsibilities side was dialled right up. DWP gets to set a set of tasks and expectations for each household claiming and is the arbiter of if they have been met.
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The boring side of tech, transparency and contact tracing
The tech-twitter conversation about contact tracing apps has focused on privacy and decentralisation. Regardless of the form it takes in the UK — and it looks like for now it will be a centralised system, (hopefully with some very strong legal constraints) — there are eight things* that the NHS should do to make sure the process enables a healthy and open public debate.
Publish a list of all the names of the different bits of technology (app, admin system, design system, etc) used to deliver the service along with the current version number and the date and time it was updated.
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The UK government should negotiate free access to Faster Payments to speed up COVID-19 payments
The thing about infrastructure is that it fades into the background to the point where people stop questioning how it works. So when the US government announced plans to make payments to citizens, the focus has been on delays needed to change the printing process to include the president’s signature, rather than the fact that cheques are being printed at all.
Similarly, when the UK Chancellor was asked yesterday about the dates for Job Retention Scheme payments to companies, he cited the need to include the delay required by the BACS electronic transfer system (which typically takes three working days).
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Digital public services: cross-civil society collaboration during the COVID19 crisis
What other opportunities are there for charities and support groups to work together on datasets during the COVID19 crisis?
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Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 4 — Data infrastructure and registers
HM Government, “Search”, GOV.UK,https://www.gov.uk/search/all?keywords=data+sharing&content_purpose_supergroup%5B%5D=news_and_communications&content_purpose_supergroup%5B%5D=research_and_statistics&content_purpose_supergroup%5B%5D=policy_and_engagement&order=relevance. Retrieved 5th June 2019. ↩︎ See this for a longer argument about why this the idea of “data sharing” needs resetting: https://medium.com/digitalhks/data-sharing-in-government-why-democracies-must-change-direction-badfaa2463ec↩︎ Paul Downey, “The characteristics of a register”, 13th October 2015, https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/10/13/the-characteristics-of-a-register/ ↩︎ Rainer Kattel and Mergel Ines, “Estonia’s digital transformation: Mission mystique and the hiding hand”, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose working Paper Series, (IIPP WP 2018–09) (2018), p10 ↩︎ Richard Pope, “Digital service standards and platforms”, digitalHKS, 26th November 2018, https://medium.
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A working definition of Government as a Platform
1. Tim O’Reilly, “Government as a Platform”, Innovations, Vol. 6, Issue. 1, Pages. 13–40, January 2011, [www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/1...](https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/INOV_a_00056)
2. See this for a more comprehensive literature review: Alan Brown, Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson and Will Venters, “Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)” Government Information Quarterly, 34 (2). pp. 167–182, 2017, [epubs.surrey.ac.uk/841964/](http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/841964/)
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Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 3 – shared components and APIs
“Unix philosophy”, Wikipedia, [en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy) 2. Peter H. Salus, “A Quarter-Century of Unix”, 1994
3. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “VA API Platform”, https://developer.va.gov
4. Open311, http://www.open311.org
5. India Stack, describes itself as “a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise an unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.”, IndiaStack, “What is India Stack?”, https://indiastack.org/about/
6. U.S. General Services Administration, ‘’Products and Platforms”, https://handbook.
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Project update — April 2019
Project update — April 2019 A reminder My name is Richard Pope and I’m a senior fellow at digitalHKS. digitalHKS is focused on understanding the relationship between digital technology, data, and rights as it relates to the public interest. It’s based at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
The focus of my work is ‘digital platforms in government’ aka Government as a Platform. The aims of the work are:
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Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 2 — The design of public-facing services
Tom Loosemoore, “Making government as a platform real”, Public Digital blog, 25th September 2018, http://public.digital/2018/09/25/making-government-as-a-platform-real/ This article includes screenshots of a prototype of a single service for starting a company in the UK Angelica Quicksey, “Service Design for Public Policy”, Medium, 29th September 2018, https://medium.com/@angelquicksey/service-design-for-policy-b0a9408dced1 Bryan Glick, “GDS is ‘sidelined’ and government as a platform ‘is dead’, says Francis Maude”, Computer Weekly, 14th September 2017, https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450426316/GDS-is-being-sidelined-and-government-as-a-platform-is-dead-says-Francis-Maude Maude said attempts to build new central functions to coordinate across departments — such as GDS — were thwarted by “mandarins” and “heavily resisted by the HM Treasury”.
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Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 1 — Introduction
Definitions: government-as-a-platform (a proposal)
Definitions: government-as-a-platform (a proposal) This is the second of several posts about definitions. The previous one looked at the range of ways people have been talking about government-as-a-platform to date. This blog post is an attempt to come up with a single working definition of government as a platform.
Firstly though, why bother?
A good definition, like a good strategy, should help answer questions and make better decisions. Things like: “Does this project we are starting really fit as part of government as a platform?
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Definitions: quotes and themes on ‘government-as-a-platform’
If you think we’ve missed a relevant quote, please get in touch
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The politics of making it easier to design digital services
The politics of making it easier to design digital services A couple of weeks ago I asked on Twitter if there was a term in service design for the explicit, political choice to make something harder to do through sub-optimal implementation.
I was not thinking of the intentional designing-in of inertia to help users reflect, to prevent a service from being overwhelmed, or to allow for additional checks. I was thinking of situations where there is a genuine political will for making a service less good than it could be, either indirectly by restricting its funding, or directly through the passing of laws.
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Digital service standards and platforms
You can find the list of service standards here and search them using this Google custom search.
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Platforms for government? Platforms for society?
Footnotes:
1. GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay are now available to all local authorities — Government as a Platform. (2018) https://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/05/notify-pay-local-authorities/
2. #VerifyLocal pilots moving from discovery to alpha – GOV.UK Verify. (n.d.). Retrieved October 30, 2018, from [identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2017/03/0...](https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2017/03/02/verifylocal-pilots-moving-from-discovery-to-alpha/)
3. Banks may use Aadhaar QR code for paperless KYC — Times of India. (n.d.). Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/banks-may-use-aadhaar-qr-code-for-paperless-kyc/articleshow/66370303.cms
4. e-Residency Benefits | Digital Nomad, Freelancer, Startup Company. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://e-resident.
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Digital proofs
Footnotes:
1 . View or share your driving licence information https://www.gov.uk/view-driving-licence
2. Things For Which Cryptographic Signing Would Be Useful. (2018, May 27) [shkspr.mobi/blog/2018...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/05/things-for-which-cryptographic-signing-would-be-useful/)
Ankur Shah Delight. (2017, June 22). Zero Knowledge Proof of Age Using Hash Chains. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from http://blog.stratumn.com/zkp-hash-chains/
3. Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer. (2014, November 27) https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-knowledge-proofs-illustrated-primer/
4. Verifiable Claims Data Model and Representations. (2017, August 3) https://www.w3.org/TR/verifiable-claims-data-model/
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Real-world government platforms
Real-world government platforms ‘Government as a platform’ normally gets talked about in terms of shared digital capabilities– things like hosting, identity or payments.
The GOV.UK Notify platform applies the concept of shared capabilities to the physical world too. As well as sending emails and SMS messages, Notify can send physical letters, via a standard API for printing and postage.
This gives the public servants designing user-facing services, a standard, well-documented way of sending letters – one which is quicker and simpler than creating something bespoke.
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Platform land – a new project looking at platforms and government
Platform land – a new project looking at platforms and government I’m starting a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School is a graduate school for students specialising in public policy or administration — broadly people who want to go on to either set public policy and regulation, plan on going in to politics in some form, or aim to go on to implement and manage a public service at the highest level.
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A Right to the Digital City
Conclusion Responding to emerging urban issues from gentrification to forced evictions & the privatisation of public space, the United Nations 2016 New Urban Agenda historically incorporated the concept of a “right to the city”: We share a vision of cities for all, referring to the equal use and enjoyment of cities and human settlements, seeking to promote inclusivity and ensure that all inhabitants, of present and future generations, without discrimination of any kind, are able to inhabit and produce just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient and sustainable cities.
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