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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Brexit, open data and dangerous products
Originally published at blog.memespring.co.ukon October 24, 2016.
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Dear England
Dear England,
You have another decision to make. A decision about the sort of country you want to be now the referendum has been decided:
You can ask your politicians to keep on administering the country much as they always have, while working to find an institutional home for the various things currently done by the EU. That is quite a task. More than enough to keep parliament busy (especially while also trying to deal with whatever fallout the referendum has on borders, the economy, society and a divided country).
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EU
Thought for the Day is an anachronism, but there is one (only one) that has ever stuck in my head. It was broadcast in 2012 by Lionel Blue and it was about Europe, particularly about Europe immediately after the war. This is the transcript from the BBC website:
While spring cleaning, I found a packet of postcards I’d sent to my parents from Holland just after the second world war.
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Policy options for getting wider adoption of the jobPosting standard
The UK government has adopted the schema.org jobPosting standard as the format that it will use to publish job vacancies on the web.
Better job adverts are important for a lot of reasons, as pointed out by Citizens Advice. In response to a tweet from Phil Rumens, below is a list of possible ways to get wider use of the standard beyond government.
Make it easier Write and opensource low-level libraries that make it easy to manipulate / generate jobPosting data structures.
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2 local government platforms someone should just build
1) Where things are (as a platform) Reuse the datastore and editing tools behind open streetmap and use it to start managing geographical data (parks, opening times, protected views, lamposts) for a single council. Then give a login to people from other councils and get them to do the same. Use the tagging system to drive out what is common between councils and what differs
2) Things that are happening at a location (as a platform) Lots of local notices (planning applications, parking suspensions, licencing applications) can be boiled down to:
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Gherkin - a universal language for accountable bots?
You can’t view source in Google Now.
Software agents of one sort or another (bots, digital assistants, news feed algorithms) seem set to make more and more decisions for us.
How will we know how they are reaching their decisions? How will we know when a decision based on a something that aligns with our best interests vs the company who provide the software?
Will some critical bots need to become subject to auditing and regulation?
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It’s not about the technology! (Apart from when it is).
“Digital/transformation/business is not about technology it’s about design / strategy / culture” is a recurring meme. It can be a comforting thing to cling on to, and it’s probably true a lot of the time, but is also not true in some important respects.
Technology does matter. Good digital / design / business / transformation / culture / strategy requires an understanding of the materials.
Open Streetmap came into existence 10 years ago in part because of affordable consumer GPS units and open-source GIS software; bespoke on-demand printing services like moo.
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7 project ideas
Some things from an Evernote notebook called ‘ideas’:
Open Need Map A structured wiki for mapping things that are needed by people and organisations at particular places. eg items at a food bank, volunteer tasks for organisations, items required at a refugee camp. Data would be available via an API so, for example, it would be possible for a third-party e-commerce service to invite you to add something a local charity needs to your basket, or for an employer that gives it’s staff time off to volunteer to add local volunteering opportunities directly to an employee’s pay slip.
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