Public Digital #20 🌏🐠 Phishing, nostalgia and the cost of failure

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Feb 1, 2019 #20

Number 20! There are now more than 1000 of you, and a few more of us at Public Digital too.

My favourite find this week is #HugOps, a movement to show support and empathy for the humans keeping our services up and running. We could all do with a bit more of that.

Emma
@egawen

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State of technology

🙈 Can you tell when you're being phished? Jigsaw / Google have just launched a new quiz based on phishing emails they've seen in the wild. I won't divulge my score but it's safe to say it's hard to tell.

Yes, we're that predictable. The New Yorker breaks down how Spotify uses nostalgia to increase engagement.

In the US, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses her platform to highlight bias in algorithms. We need more politicians that can do this credibly.

Facebook continues to drip drip drip away any doubt that they are misusing data by mistake, this time paying teenagers to access their personal data. The fallout has spread to Google too.

💰TSB reports their catastrophic 2018 IT migration cost them £330.2m, and lost an extra 30k customers. A terrifying figure for all legacy banks, who have to modernise or become irrelevant.

Ways of working

Why designers should learn to code so designs are of the web, not put on the web.

Governance is good. A thoughtful look at getting governance right, with some principles I can get behind and a great reading list too.

🎥 Till Wirth from the UK's Government Digital Service on agile teams, and why you should keep them small.

Government news

If making digital part of Government is your thing (since you're here, probably yes) a series published this week on Wiring Public Policy for Digital Government is worth your time. My two picks:

Alistair Croll explores why it's hard for government to embrace iterative development.
PD's Andrew Greenway examines why policy in government has to change.

👩🏼‍⚕️As of the 21st Jan, Finnish e-prescriptions can be used in Estonia. This is the latest in a close collaboration between the two countries, who already share data through X-Road. While Estonia are typically ahead of the curve, this is part of a wider EU eHealth programme that will see e-Prescriptions shared by 10 EU states by the end of 2019.

🇩🇰Denmark's Rikke Hougaard Zeberg sets out the six priority areas in 2019 for the world's leading digital nation, with the first being consistency between a number of self-service platforms. Danish | Google translate

PD affiliate Emily Webber

News from Public Digital

We are growing! We’re building a global network of affiliates who can help us work in more places, more of the time.

And, we've welcomed Ali Kelly to the team to help the network grow. Say 👋 to Ali and our new affiliates.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery is available to buy in print and on Kindle, direct from the publisher, from Amazon, or Book Depository.

We’re Public Digital. We work for governments and large organisations around the world to help them adapt to the internet era.

We are based in London but operate globally. If you'd like to work with us email contact@public.digital.