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30 November 2022 #70

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

🇵🇪  Earlier this month our network members Dan Abadie and Andrea Barenque participated in the seventh annual Red Gealc meeting in Peru – an event that observes and celebrates the advances in digital transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Themes included cybersecurity, open data, and digital signature and cross-border interoperability. Andrea presented our ‘emerging technologies adoption model’ which aims to help countries develop new technology whilst acknowledging that humans are in charge of its implementation, regulation, monitoring and control.

Read Dan’s reflection in English or in Spanish.


Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

🤝  Why can’t we all just get along? is good from Agile consultant and network member Emily Webber. It’s all about the dangers of being specialism-focussed at the expense of collaboration and valuable outcomes. Top marks for the supporting illustrations too.

💔  As we once again slide into recession in the UK, budget cuts are inevitable. Unfortunately, Supporting the closure of a team from delivery expert Rachael Shah will be useful for many. Her follow up post advises on how to run a retro once the team has been told it will be disbanded. Also includes a Miro board template.

💚  Design Group Italia has shared a kit to guide designers to make more sustainable decisions. Here’s the supporting blog post which cites the European Commission’s research into the ecodesign of energy-related products which estimates that “over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase.” Eighty percent!

👏🏽  Another good and helpful thing: Food for hungry product minds is a collection of good people, podcasts, blogs and newsletters with a product management slant. Pulled together by Simon Waldman who is open to more suggestions.

🙄  Also useful: 10 free Google Chrome extensions and 11 Google Docs tips that claim to save us hours. Tessa (compiler of the latter) also says 25 million people use Google Docs. Interested to know how many of those are workarounds for Word… 

📘  Network member Kate Tarling’s book The Service Organization on how to lead and deliver successful services sustainably is available for pre-order here and you can follow Kate here

📌  And finally, a poster reminding us to start with the problem before working on a solution by the team at DigitalService, Germany.  German version here. Print it out, stick it up.

State of technology

💰  The story of the fall of the FTX ‘King of Crypto’ Sam Bankman-Fried has it all. Immense investment and catastrophic loss; video game addiction; a desk-side beanbag bed (?!), and the complexity of Bankman-Fried’s character: a figurehead in 2 ‘cults’ that don’t necessarily tally: 1. crypto and 2. the "effective altruism movement" (a community aiming to find the best ways to have a positive impact on the world). Nice piece by The Atlantic here. Did somebody say TV adaptation?

🤯  Twitter. Where to start? Musk did a Twitter poll to ask if the platform should offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts. 73% said yes and Musk replied, “Amnesty begins next week.” Pray for those ‘hardcore’ engineers who – with less influence from product management and design – may end up prioritising the backlog based on a (VIP) stakeholder’s whim. Incidentally, Quartz is keeping a list of all the things that aren’t working on Twitter anymore

👂  And back to effective altruism, the Wall Street Journal’s podcast Bad Bets looks at Trevor Milton, the entrepreneur who promised a zero-emissions semi truck that could revolutionise the trucking industry. The series unpacks the ways it went wrong. Spoiler: bad governance, bad actors, people committing fraud simply because they could.

🤷‍♂️  Journalist Moya Lothian-McLean’s piece The gods of Silicon Valley are falling to earth. So are their warped visions for society links everything above. “It’s utilitarianism with a god complex.” Reminded me of Ella Fitzsimmons’ talk from 2017 Tech, Polyphony and Power which looks at the hero worship and the dangers of putting these men at the centre of an organisation's narrative.

Digital government

💡  Keeping forms short is a permanent battle. Every well-intentioned policy person or minister seems to want to ask more but each extra question added makes someone’s access harder, their fear greater and the cost of verification higher. A 1,000-question form stood between people and their safety net benefits. These advocates designed a better approach is a piece by the Gates Foundation that really resonated with our colleagues Lara, Anna and Heather who were instrumental in the UK’s Universal Credit programme. “We followed this rule: if the question doesn't generate a direct difference to the amount of money or service a user gets, it doesn't get added.”

🤔  Interesting: the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions is leading a project which aims to use the rules-as-code approach to design legislation that is readable by humans and machines. Computer-readable code will improve delivery of citizen services that are now often provided digitally. Good stuff! But, bad stuff: only visible via proprietary software. Finger crossed DWP lawyers understand the risks of proprietary software lock-in by the vendor.

🇨🇦  Ace work from Canada's federal welfare team on service standards and shifting from compliance to creativity. After all, “people are complex, messy, chaotic, and wonderful” so when we design people-centred services we must keep this in mind. “We need to explore processes, practices, and relationships outside of compliance-based governance.

🔒  The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published its 2022 review. Biggest threat? Still commodity ransomware (attacks that use readily available tools) aimed at defrauding the public and businesses. Page 21 summarises the ongoing success of the Active Cyber Defence programme which provides digital products and services to help organisations manage their risks. Unsurprisingly, Russia is still seen as an “acute and persistent threat” (China and Iran to a lesser degree). And, in reference to Ukraine's resistance to the illegal Russian invasion in cyberspace there’s a strong emphasis on greater cooperation between big tech companies and governments (page 5). Twitter summary here.

🇯🇵  Japan now has a design system thanks to The Digital Agency Service Design Unit. Interesting to snoop around. Also stumbled across this deck on policy design from Japan+D covering why policy needs design and who it serves. Includes 6 solid case studies too.

🇹🇻  'First digital nation': this clip shows Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe speaking about turning to the metaverse as rising seas threaten the country’s existence. In his address from a digital version of the island nation he says it is the only way to preserve it so that they can remind their 'children and grandchildren what their home once was'. Could Tuvalu create its digital twin before being lost to the collapsing climate?

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