Week #111 at the Digital Service: Notes for 10–14 June 2024

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A woman stands in front of a whiteboard filled with colorful sticky notes, presenting to a group. She wears a white shirt over a gray top and blue jeans, gesturing with her hands. Two individuals, one with curly hair and another in a green t-shirt, listen attentively. The whiteboard has two sections labeled "Group 2" and "Group 3" with various questions and comments written on the notes. The room is bright with large windows in the background.

I was very exhausted on Friday evening but full of energy at the same time. I have not seen this much outstanding public design work in one single week before. This week was a blast, and I’m so grateful for the openness of international public sector colleagues who shared their work, experiences, and stories. I’m still radiating from the energy everyone shared.

Talking to colleagues about global patterns

Creative Bureaucracy Festival brought so many people to Berlin, and we made the best possible use of it. On Friday, Kara and I ran a workshop on global design patterns—inviting national and international colleagues to review the service patterns developed for GovStack. Partnering with their creators Betty Mwema and Laurence Berry, supported by Stefan Draškić, folks from Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom looked at service patterns, good practice guidelines, and archetypical user flows to see how they could make use of them in their work context.

Nora from GovStack gave an introduction to the project, Betty shared the patterns, and Laurence demonstrated a neat way to utilise Figma to work with the patterns. To work effectively, we split into 3 groups:

  • People working on design patterns
  • People working with design patterns
  • People interested in working with design patterns

We discussed what’s missing and the limits of these patterns, which were inspired by other great work done in Essex, Helsinki, and Japan. We could see immediate applications for public services in Berlin, Hamburg, and German justice services.

Four people sit attentively in a meeting room, listening to someone outside the frame. The man on the left wears a plaid shirt, the woman next to him has short blonde hair and large hoop earrings, the man beside her is in a light-colored shirt, and the man in the back wears glasses and a dark shirt. There are large windows and a potted plant in the background, providing a bright, natural light to the room. A man with curly hair is partially visible in the foreground.

Now, more remote and in-person workshops and in-team reviews, as well as more writing and blogging, need to follow.

On Tuesday afternoon, I raced to the ‘Global Government Innovators Forum 2024’, a Creative Bureaucracy Festival-adjacent pre-event. The ever-charming Charles Landry and brilliant Robyn Bennett allowed me to arrive late and immediately pitch an unconference session on ‘Cross-European service quality and interoperability standards’. In the following 45 minutes, we had a vivid exchange about local capability, different national legal cultures and EU-wide enforcement of service design standards.

Three people are seated at a table in a meeting room, engaged in discussion. The man in the center, wearing glasses and a striped shirt, gestures with his hands while speaking. A man to his right, who has dark skin, wears glasses and a suit with a pink tie and listens intently. A woman with brown hair, seen from the back, is on the left side of the image. The table has glasses, papers, and a lemonade bottle. Behind them, various informational posters and charts are displayed on the walls, which are made of exposed brick.

Listening to learn from abroad and around the corner

On Tuesday afternoon, Maria and I hosted our second NExT community gathering of the year. The topic was “digital accessibility”. We heard from 5 different great speakers, which made us run massively over time. My colleague Marion was among them, doing a German version of a talk she gave about our accessibility work at a recent Service Design Drinks event. We also heard from the state pension provider and the Federal accessibility monitoring unit.

On Wednesday, I welcomed Roberta Tassi, former Head of Service Design of the Italian Government’s Digital Transformation Team, to our office for a learning lunch. Roberta gave an overview of the change work she led in Italy, how it started small and scaled, and how one has to retain one’s designerly identity and work practices in a writing-first policymaker environment. Roberta left the group of designers, engineers, product, and transformation managers with glowing eyes and me with a few personal notes.

A woman with curly hair and glasses is leading a meeting, speaking to a group of five people seated around a table. She gestures with her hands as she talks. Behind her, large windows offer a view of greenery outside. A large screen to her right displays a presentation slide with text reading "~30 EXPERTS" and "+22k ADMINISTRATIONS." The attendees, whose backs are facing the camera, include individuals with different hair colors and styles. The room is bright, with natural light streaming in from the windows.

On Thursday night, Christian, Magdalena, Tobias, and I ran our fifth public sector innovation meetup. With ‘Innovating public healthcare’ as the set topic, we heard from Anette Ströh from Europe’s biggest university hospital, Charité and Sebastian Festag from the Senate Department for Higher Education and Research, Health and Long-Term Care about their work on practical healthcare innovation through prototypes. The 40+ meetup visitors flooded them with questions, and still, we had too little time to discuss recipes for systemic change and enablement for more collaboration.

Once again, we had some 75 to 80% new attendees to the meetup. We advertised the event through broader channels than Meetup.com, which seems to have worked.

After all these inputs and interactions at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, there is much to process, write up, and follow up on. I’m just massively grateful for the opportunity to have countless small exchanges with so many terrific, caring minds this week.

What’s next

Next week will be busy, too.

We’ll have our design and user research offsite event on Thursday. On Friday, we’ll celebrate our summer party. But to deserve that, I need to tour with Caro and the Service Standard to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. And I will talk about our work at the GovTech Campus with tech entrepreneurs from my hometown in my role as digital council of Sachsen-Anhalt.