This week was Creative Bureaucracy Festival again. It was the biggest edition so far.
I joined the first one in 2019. I remember an exchange with Digital Service co-founder Sonja at the time. That was before our unit existed, though. The event was much smaller, and international slots and guests were much more rare.
This year, many people from all around the world came to attend the festival. So, I got to catch up with people I had not seen in many years or never met in person yet. It is impressive to see how the festival organisers have managed to grow the event’s international visibility significantly over the past few years.
“As a community manager you have to be a Kindergartener, look after everyone.” —Chikako Masuda mentioning @imhuyorks.bsky.social at #CBF25 in a discussion with @dominiccampbell.bsky.social and @tamarasrzentic.bsky.social
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 5, 2025 at 11:02 AM
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On the day before, on Wednesday afternoon, my colleague Paul hosted a group of Dutch justice designers in our office. I couldn’t be around. He kindly took over and managed their visit. They seemed pleased afterwards.
This year, we had the most considerable Digital Service presence at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival yet. Around 20 of us attended. We actively participated in 5 sessions, including panel discussions and short presentations. I was not directly involved in these and mostly used the time to catch up with colleagues from abroad and across the country. In addition, I helped record a couple of sessions, as the festival usually doesn’t. However, I saw value in capturing some content for a broader audience. After refining my tech routine at the Amsterdam conference, I am pretty efficient with recording content anywhere.
Co-running a policy design workshop
With the crowd Creative Bureaucracy Festival pulls into the city, running activities is a must. So, while I had no active part in the event itself, I did organise things for the day after.
Reminder! 🔔 We’re about to close the sign-up for our Friday #Design for #policy workshop. Currently, we’ve over 30 sign-ups from people from 4 continents. We’ll have various short inputs on different flavours of #policyDesign and workshop things. 🎟️ www.tickettailor.com/events/inter…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 3, 2025 at 12:03 PM
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I put together a 3-hour ‘design for policy’ session for Friday with Kara from the UK Cabinet Office and David from the European Commission. As usual, it was a bit last-minute production – with a speaker cancelling the night before but a replacement agreeing just minutes before midnight and less than 10 hours before the session.
We had a decent number of over 30 sign-ups but didn’t know how many people would show up. Various folks dropped out on short notice, and others decided to join at the last minute or brought some colleagues along.
On Friday, we explored different modes of ‘design for #policy’. Throughout the 3-hour workshop with 🇩🇰🇪🇺🇩🇪🇨🇭🇸🇬🇹🇷🇺🇸🇬🇧, we heard from 3 policy teams working at very different levels: @ec.europa.eu — for 449 million people @bmi.bund.de — for 84 million people @camdencouncil.bsky.social — for 210,000 people
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 8, 2025 at 6:36 PM
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Eventually, we had 3 exceptional inputs.
David and his colleague Marta from the EU Policy Lab presented their structure and reflections on the impact of design on policymaking. My colleagues Sarah and Nina presented Germany’s approach to digital-ready legislation. Lastly, Ale from Camden Council reported about her work as Head of Policy and Service Design and how they are designing policy with communities. The 3 complementary inputs came together incredibly well. And we used the second half of the morning to unpick some of the things we heard in 3 smaller groups.
Afterwards, quite a few people stayed for an international lunch reception that Joshua, Magdalena and I had invited to. We had pizza and further exchange. For me, that even continued later in the evening when I rejoined our American colleagues from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for an extended dinner.
Launching the Service Standard with a new home
The most significant side activity of the week was publishing the entirely rewritten Service Standard and launching servicestandard.gov.de.
The updated #ServiceStandard on the #CBF25 stage: my colleagues Ralf from @bmi.bund.de and Robert from @digitalservice.bund.de sharing the work of the past year via a quiz and share the link to its new home: servicestandard.gov.de
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 5, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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We had already published the underlying DIN specification in early March – see weeknote #149. It determines the requirements and lays the groundwork for the new page. But the specification isn’t the most legible document. It uses a predetermined syntax – with ‘must’ or ‘should’ in every sentence – and is not necessarily written in plain language. So, the new Service Standard website – even in its first release – makes everything much more accessible and easier to understand.
I made the first design draft in a co-working session with content designer Linn. Then, Tito took over, improved, and extended the structure vastly. An external development partner of our colleagues from ZenDiS – the Centre for Digital Sovereignty, who hosts things for us on OpenCode helped us develop the current page.
The page utilises all 4 building blocks of the umbrella brand: It incorporates the slim header with the German flag, the new logo, the KERN Design System, and it runs on the new gov.de domain. It might be the very first offering doing so.
The first release is humble. It translates the 13 criteria into plain language. It also gives an overview of how the German Service Standard came to be and what the further development roadmap looks like. Public roadmaps remain extremely rare in the German public sector. I am glad we have one.
In the coming weeks, we plan to extend the offering step by step. We want to create guidance that quickly surpasses that of the previous manual in quality and scope.
My colleagues, policy officer Ralf and product manager Robert, presented the updated Service Standard at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival on stage. As the circumstances allowed, they did so through a little quiz. Afterwards, various attendees had questions, and we had fruitful conversations with public servants interested in applying the standard and participating in peer reviews.
Reviewing salaries and performance
One big task that kept me busy until Wednesday was the preparations for the annual salary cycle and performance review. Since late March I spent time with it, and things itensified in the last few weeks. In the past 2 weeks, I had almost had related meetings daily.
I rarely mention such work here, even though it captures a good portion of my calendar at times.
On Wednesday, during a full-day offsite with the entire leadership team and the people partners, I represented 32 user-centred design folks—that excluded team members on parental leave, working students and the communication designers. Given the grown team, we did not have time to discuss everyone. So, we focussed on promotions, level moves and exceptional cases. Much of the work we prepared in calibration workshops in the past few weeks.
This has been my third offsite of such kind at Digital Service, and things are well iterated now. I received tremendous support from principals Charlotte and Sonjas, as well as from people partner Annemie. Our Head of People, Anna-Lisa, blogged about our salary system back in September, and it got people from other parts of the public sector interested, too. I am glad we wrapped up this time-consuming part of the annual salary and performance review. The following steps are taken by the executive team, people, and finance team.
What’s next
I’m a little busy with non-work tasks next week, and it’s also a shorter week due to a bank holiday.
We plan to do some joint research synthesis for the umbrella brand in the team. On Thursday, we hope to speak with our U.S. colleagues who worked on the well-structured get.gov page.