A Guide To The New Field Of Software Politics 2016 was the year it became impossible to ignore the power software exerts on society. Today, in 2018, we can start to identify the companies and organizations that are putting power back in the hands of consumers. [Source Images: Federica Galli/Unsplash (photo), Vanzyst/iStock (pattern)]Software is politics. I wrote that back in 2016, arguing that the digital services we all rely on should not just be designed for ease of use–they also need to be understandable, accountable, and trusted.
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A model planning condition for digital infrastructure
Following from my previous post about the ability of the UK planning system to deal with digital infrastructure like the InLink, it seems there may be a mechanism to give communities a say over what sensors, data collection practices and targeted advertising they invite in.
It’s the same one we use to regulate things like the opening hours of shops: ‘[planning conditions’.
Planning conditions allow a local authority to list the things that must not change without prior agreement - things like opening hours or the number of carparking spaces in the car park.
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InLinkUK - targeted advertising, planning permission and public space
Our local high street is going to have one of its phoneboxes replaced with an ‘InLink’.
InLink is a public wifi network provided by BT through on-pavement ‘structures’ and funded through advertising displayed on a big screen on the side of them.
They have some additional functions, like making a free phone call or looking up local information, but given smartphones are a thing most people now have, advertising and wifi are the main play here.
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Bye2k - government IT and Brexit
As Mat points out, one of the unwritten stories about if Brexit can be implemented is that of the changes required of ‘government IT’.
How many databases will need to be updated to store a distinction between U.K. and EU citizens? How many government services rely on access to EU systems and APIs? What EU systems do we rely on today that will need to be rebuilt from scratch in the next 18 months?
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GDS Retrospective #5: things that have changed
To finish of this seris of retrospective posts I thought I’d list 7 things that have changed for the better as a result of the things GDS and others across government have done over recent years:
Understanding the needs of users through research (and other methods) is part of how digital services get designed and built. So is testing real things early with real users.
It is now accepted that it is OK to use open-source in government, and that code and designs can be shared across government.
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GDS Retrospective #4: transformation and mental health
Transformation projects can be hugely rewarding, but something that needs talking about more is this: they can take a toll on the people doing them.
With transformation projects, you generally can’t talk publicly about the work you are doing. If it fails, it’s like you never did it. And if it works, it (rightly and justifiably) has to be other people’s success.
You can find people who feel threatened by a transformation project, if not quite shouting at you, or subtly trying to undermine your work, then at least being non-cooperative.
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GDS Retrospective #3: professions and design
In reality, it’s something I think to be simultaneously true and not true.
It’s true because you only get good stuff from people with different skills working together, when every member of a team can contribute to the design of products and that it is important to use and understand the materials available.
I also think it’s also true because how we build digital products was changing - platforms like Twilio and Heroku, and mature CSS and web frameworks making just easier to build things.
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Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy — here’s what the policy response should be
Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy — here’s what the policy response should be In 2013, Ian Duncan-Smith said “looking for work should be a full-time job”. This was to be policed through the ‘claimant commitment’ a document that details, among other things, the number and type of jobs that someone is expected to apply for. People would then present evidence that they were spending up to 35 hours a week trying to meet those targets when they signed-on.
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Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy - here's what the policy response should be
In 2013, Ian Duncan-Smith said “looking for work should be a full-time job”. This was to be policed through the ‘claimant commitment’ a document that would detail, among other things, the number and type of jobs that someone would be expected to apply for. People would then present evidence that they were spending up to 35 hours a week trying to meet those targets when they signed-on.
Proving you are spending time looking for work has been a component of the British welfare system for a long time.
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GDS Retrospective #2: tools for making & communities
GDS Retrospective #2: tools for making & communities Tools that help teams make things faster and tools help teams talk to each other better are very powerful leavers when it comes to digital transformation.
That networks eventually emerged across government in the form of Slack channels is great, and I am genuinly excited every-time I see an update to the GOV.UK prototyping tools and design patterns that edge it towards becoming a solid, generic set of tools.
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A GDS Retrospective #1: knowing when to run
A pretty solid approach to building digital services and to digital transformation emerged out of the work of GDS and others across government.
It is a synthesis of established processes of user-centered design, civil service processes and the collective wisdom (and biases) of lots of people. It’s broadly set out in the Government Service Design Manual and can be characterised as setup a multi-disciplinary team of 5–15 people, then do one or more of: Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live.
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GDS Retrospective #1: knowing when to run
This is part of a series of blog posts about reflections on my time at GDS. See background and caveats.
A solid approach to building digital services and to digital transformation emerged from the work of GDS - a synthesis of established processes of user-centered design, civil service processes and the collective wisdom (and, inevitably, biases) of lots of people*. It is broadly set out in the Government Service Design Manual and can be characterised as 1) assume you know nothing 2) setup a multi-disciplinary team of 5 - 15 people 3) then do some combination of Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live over a period of 4 - 12 months.
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Beckton - a tool to build groups of paying members
img {max-width:300px; border:solid 1px #ccc; margin-bottom:5px;} Is it possible to build a general purpose tool for creating a paying membership organisation?
Last spring, I was introduced to Roger Hallam, a researcher at Kings who had been investigating the use of what he terms ‘conditional commitments’ - the “I’ll do X if n other people will do too” design pattern pioneered by mySociety’s PledgeBank service, and later used by KickStarter.
10 years on from PledgeBank, it should be many times easier to build a focused conditional commitment service, because today, we have services like GoCardless and Stripe, as well as things like Twillio and MailGun for messaging.
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Activity based permissions
Activity based permissions I got a CleanSpace Tag pollution monitor via a promotion with the London Cycling Campaign.
Putting aside the fact that users don’t retain rights to the data they generate, it’s a rather excellent idea: build a real-time crowd-source map of pollution by getting cyclists to mount cheap devices on their bikes.
The problem is that it requires an app to constantly track your location, even when the app is not running.
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Retrospective
Retrospective I often wonder how different things might have been if I had not gone on holiday after the beta of GOV.UK launched. Growing organisations have points in time when the future gets fixed, and that was one of them.
While I’m proud of a bunch of the work I did in subsequent 4 years, I never really ever got to set the creative direction at GDS directly again and I never got to blog.
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Is the internet the problem?
As ever, Julian is both almost certainly right about this and has the clarity of thought to state it properly (and as ever buried in a post mostly about other things):
I have the view that the “Internet” part of the “Internet of Things” is the problem, with all these servers, gateways, analytics, and remote controls from anywhere in the world. None of it does anything useful, because the value of data and control of a thing is inversely proportional to your remoteness from it in time and space.
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Designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted (OSCON 2016 talk)These are…
Originally published at blog.memespring.co.ukon November 23, 2016.
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Designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted (OSCON 2016 talk)
These are the speaker notes and slides from my talk at OSCON 2016 last month.
Hello.
Welcome to this session about power and importance of designing digital services that are understandable, accountable and trusted.
I’m hoping to convince you that designing digital services that are understandable, accountable and trusted is now a commercial as well as a moral imperative, and that building an open society in the digital age is about more than open code.
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Facebook and Twitter as public service networks (it’s not just about the algorithm)
1) It doesn’t have to be operated by a government, it could be a new institution setup by the industry, but government seems most likely.
2) I had an unsuccessful attempt at this with [Streetwire]([web.archive.org/web/20081...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081219040000/http://www.streetwire.org/)
) back in 2009 (but then it didn’t have a global audience of billions!). I am currently working on a platform to try and at least collect information like this in a structured way so that other services could use it.
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Facebook and Twitter as public service networks (it's not just about the algorithm)
It’s pretty clear that the code that chooses what we see on social media needs to be more transparent.
Hopefully, we will start to see governments1 move to some form of regulation model where code can be inspected and held accountable (the UK and US governments are already doing this for the software in gambling machines).
Surely there will also be progress towards explaining how code works, even if the code itself cannot be revealed.
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