Shaky evidence of a pretty solid podcast recording session: On Wednesday afternoon, I joined Ann-Christin Ahrens and Daniela Hensel on their podcast ‘why’.
They started the podcast series in the summer of 2023 and have made it to 11 episodes so far. There aren’t many service design podcasts in German. So, it’s great it exists. Previous guests were Prof Birgit Mager, who I joined on another podcast earlier this year, and also my former colleague Anika Wilczek. The public sector is relatively well covered – next to guests from the private sector.
We recorded for about 50 minutes. The final cut should be around 30 minutes or so. It will come out in June.
Preparing a new home for the updated Service Standard
After over 9 months of work on the new Service Standard, things became more tangible this week. Finally.
Designer Tito joined our team temporarily to help us prototype the future home of the Service Standard and related guidance.
After content designer Linn and I made a sketch a few weeks ago, Tito brought things to the next level. He went beyond the landing page, listing the 13 points. Now, there is an overview page for each of them. Tito also made a history page telling the origins of the German Service Standard and drafted a page with updates and the DIN specification itself.
We have to tweak a few more things before showing the prototype to attendees of the content workshop we are running from next Tuesday onwards.
The prototype utilises the elements of the umbrella brand. It builds on the KERN Design System, contains the Federal header – similar to those on US and EU websites, displays the cross-government eagle symbol and aims to claim servicestandard.gov.de.
It feels great seeing these things coming together – while this is still just the starting point of much more work to come.
Planning next peer reviews
Lene and I got together to review which services should receive a peer review next. After a great run throughout summer and autumn, we slowed down quite a bit.
Now, at least 3 services at DigitalService should receive a review in the coming weeks: civil court claims service, the open data platform for legal information, and more legal aid services in the justice space. The latter had their last peer review about 1.5 years ago. Since then, it has evolved much.
There are multiple reasons why it matters:
- we need to stick to our reviewing practice
- we need to track the progress of services reviewed before
- we need to test the updated Service Standards with its condensed 13 points
- we need to get feedback and tweak the new 13 points
- we need to expose more people from more organisations to the Service Standard
In the absence of very rich Service Standard guidance, peer review reports against the updated standard can offer people a good reference of what other teams do.
Planning next community events
Kara and I checked in with David from the EU Policy Lab on Friday. We discussed running an event adjacent to the Creative Bureaucracy Festival for a few months. Now, we developed a more concrete idea. We want to bring interested folks working on policy design together.
We plan to run a 4-hour workshop at Digital Service on the morning after the Creative Bureaucracy Festival on 6 June. In the coming days, we’ll put in the invitation together.
Before that, we are doing a few things for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. We are running a call with the international community on the afternoon of 15 May. For other community members in different time zones, it will be a different time, of course.
Later that day, in the early evening, we will host the 3rd local meetup of this year. We plan to announce the event earlier than the most recent ones, as we had a slightly lower attendance than previously. More run-up time will hopefully change that again.
📣 Save the date! For Global #Accessibility Awareness Day—or short #GAAD—on 15 May, we’ll be running 2 events: 🌐 An int’l #GovDesign call at 3:30 pm BST / 4:30 CEST / 10:30 am EDT / 7:30 am PDT 📍 A local #publicSector innovation meetup in Berlin at @digitalservice.bund.de More details to come…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) April 26, 2025 at 8:12 PM
What’s next
As mentioned, we will continue iterating the prototype before the Service Standard content workshop, which Linn and Robert will be co-leading. I will miss most of the first day but join for the second one. I won’t have to facilitate but contribute regarding content.
On Monday and Tuesday, I will participate in an external leadership training. I am looking forward to that.
We have received 143 applications so far. In 5 days. Over the Easter holiday weekend.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) April 22, 2025 at 6:57 PM
[image or embed]
I will also take a look at the applications we have received over the Easter weekend. It’s been more than 150 by the end of the week.