Bye.
Bye, everybody.
Thank you.
We’re all looking forward to traveling finally again.
The speed, the cost-sharing, and the ability to engage in more agile transformation is something people are beginning to understand. Probably, in the interest of time easy is to appoint you to some other resources that are very useful on this topic.
We inserted ourselves in the middle by writing an executive order to give us the authority [laughs] to do so. We’re still trying to get it out the door.
We’re about to do an executive order, for example, that I wrote not only to mandate radical inter-agency data sharing but to put myself in charge. Any time somebody wants to build any component that faces the public or interacts with the public, they have to come to us for ...
We found very little resistance to the push toward open-source software. What we still find very heavy lift because it’s hard to explain and it’s legally difficult is the data sharing and data standards-setting that we need.
Being able to build core components and services and APIs on top of them using open data standards to be able to accelerate innovation and digital transformation is so much more important.
There’s, of course, all the cybersecurity arguments but appealing to the bottom line that you’re going to get the best in class services as a result, is really, really important. Even more important than the open-source code is data interoperability and data sharing, and the ability to design the whole ...
We built new business services platform, and we saved easily 6 to 12 months by stealing code from another jurisdiction and building on what they had done. We were able to explain how much time it saved us and therefore, how much money it saved us.
In terms of the arguments, it’s very helpful in terms of political leadership to understand like the arguments that it’s again the right thing to do, or not very helpful. It’s faster, and it’s cheaper.
There is by the way a whole lot of people who focus on open source policy-making too. In terms of helping people to understand what a pull request is, it’s not just code but doing policy in an open source way, which may help to explain it.
In the US, there’s no incentive, there’s no requirement, there’s no vision. You just have no culture of learning particularly, and then when people get busy, it’s the very first thing that you stop doing, is you stop upscaling, basically.
In Singapore, they’ve said, “We think it’s important for public servants to know how to code.” I don’t think that’s the right thing, frankly, but I like the fact that they’ve picked something, and that there’s a vision for what to do, which we completely lack in the United States.
What we lack for sure, in the United States, unlike in Singapore and Canada, and some other places, we don’t have a strategy or a vision. No one says, “In the 21st century, we think it’s important for public servants to know how to use data and how to engage ...
In Germany, it’s a little different in that they…There’re requirements for training. It’s part of your collective bargaining agreement – as part of the public sector unions – that you do get to do training. It’s still a struggle and getting people to do the right training.
In Argentina, they give you points – like frequent flyer points – for courses that you take and that translates into economic raises. You don’t get promoted without learning.
Training is treated as a reward. You get selected to be part of a course. It’s a big honor to be picked so it becomes something competitive.
A really good point. I don’t know the situation in Taiwan. I can tell you that…I hope you’ll tell us. In Singapore, learning is mandatory and there is a real culture of learning – the sense that I will fall behind the private sector if I don’t train and learn.
It’s the interplay between doing and learning at the same time that is useful. Having a team that can extract the experiences and turn it into something shareable, that’s very helpful.
Which is, now that we’ve introduced you to some of these skills around co-design as well as uses of data, we then work with you to learn how to apply this to your own projects. We’ve started doing office hours, where you can come with a project you’re working on ...
We graduate people from a little bit of content to a little bit of something in your own time, to something live and a little bit longer, to something slightly longer. Then we graduate from there to coaching.
What happens is, we start people with a very, very brief introduction to something like a 10-minute video about co-design. Then that gets them more interested. What happens is, we just did for example, an eight-part course on co-designing solutions to problems.
We’re constantly taking what we’re learning from practice and turning it into teaching materials. We have a team that’s become good at writing scripts and editing them and creating learning objects if you will, out of these experiences.
We were taking the lessons we were learning and turning them into short videos that we could then share with people. Then we turn the videos into a series of live masterclasses, which we’re now doing across states. Now, we’re starting a new project with UNDP to do this across ...
Find the link. I’ll put a link to one of the earlier. We’ve been doing a lot of skills training for a long time, but then when I took this latest role in government, one of the first things I did, some of you have seen this was to build ...
We try to distill things in two very short forms. We’re also trying to create more of a library of examples that we can use for teaching and training. Oops, wrong link for me.
We do that through, doing things like writing case studies, but then we turn the case studies into podcasts. We turn them into one-pagers because we know that the busy government professionals we work with, don’t have time or interest to read long case studies.
As far as documenting learnings, we’ve been trying to…There’s two ways in which we do that. One is, by having learning via central focus, it means we’re constantly in that process of trying to figure out lessons learned.
Audrey, you first, and then I’ll go change it up.
To be sure that you’re inviting the right people, which we can get into. Long story short, make it relevant.
The best practice is the ability to explain to somebody how their input is going to be used and potentially when needed to pay them for their time, but that’s another topic.
Especially with something more basic like human-centered design or I’m asking you may be to test a website for me, or asking you some questions so I can design a better website or service.
It’s about clarity of instructions and directions, clarity of workflow, and having thought through the process ahead of time. To come back to the original question is why the training is so important because you need to teach people how to do that and how to articulate that kind of ...
All of the work goes into explaining to them, preparing how to explain to people why we’re going to treat their time with care and with respect, and what the outcomes will be.
It doesn’t mean you have to promise to use everything people tell you. You just have to be able to explain the purpose. Tomorrow I came from a two-hour meeting to plan. We have 30 groups in the room tomorrow, and we’re asking them to spend two days with us ...
Similarly, what makes for a bad hackathon is a bunch of people making apps that nobody is going to use. I think the important thing is not to wind up the machinery of engagement or open innovation co-design, co-creation without the ability to explain how it’s useful.
The great part about what Audrey does is, there’s an outcome to it. It’s not citizen engagement or participation for its own sake. The fact that Taiwan has the example of saying we crafted 26 pieces of national legislation, as a result of co-design, is much more powerful frankly than ...
The lesson for hackathons, or for any engagement, is the same, which is, you have to make it relevant. What works so well about…I’m going to sing Audrey’s praises because she’s here and it’s fun to do and better than talking only about myself. I’ll give some other examples too ...
There’s a lot of interesting global cases around how people are doing different things, defining a problem together, or solving a problem together. Let me stop with that.
Then, a guide, a short and longer paper that we did with Nesta, on what are the lessons learned from that. If you click on the report, you’ll see there’s a short guide. We have everything summarized in one picture.
Just as we know that you need some training in data science to be able to use data and open data, you need training to be able to engage in co-design. I’ll stop by putting a link in the chat. Not to any of the things I mentioned, but to ...
That’s where some of Audrey’s work around the participation officer’s network, and teaching people how to co-design and co-create is so crucial. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of talent in capacity building, to be able to do co-design.
People are talking about it. They don’t have experience doing it. They haven’t been trained in how to do it in university or in graduate school. It’s not part of the job description. If you’re coming out of a tech culture and you know what a hackathon is, it’s one ...
Starting from the perspective of what are you trying to accomplish, is incredibly useful as a basic idea for knowing what kind of a co-design process to implement. Number one. Number two, it’s recognizing – as you explained at the outset, Joichi – that a lot of the discussions about ...
For these different stages of policy implementation or project management, it’s useful to have the right platform. It becomes very easy to use the wrong platform for the wrong purpose, or the wrong process for the wrong purpose.
To be very clear about when we’re trying to engage in human-centered design versus crowdsourcing versus open innovation versus collaboration. It’s crucial to be clear on whether the goal is to try to identify a problem or to solve the problem together or to implement a solution to a problem ...
Let me share three broader points here. One is that it’s very important to recognize that there are different types of co-design or collective intelligence or engagement or whatever term we want to use.
Tomorrow, I’m running the same project in California, to co-design solutions to urban challenges between government and residents. I’m happy to share more details on this. On the model that we use for doing this co-design work.
