I couldn’t resist capturing evidence of the existence of the new ministry. While it’s still forming, you can sense a somewhat difference in the former space of the Ministry of Interior. While the building sign hasn’t been changed yet, a new press conference wall has already been installed. I felt too drawn to take a selfie.
Right before doing so, state secretary Richter walked across a newly opened part of the building where I had done some work in an open seating corner. He approached me. We chatted for some minutes, and he was genuinely excited about the new setup, minister, and ministerial remit.
Discussing Service Standard and umbrella brand
I visited the ministry for two monthly check-ins with our ministerial partners on Tuesday morning and afternoon.
Like every month, we gave our stakeholders an update on our progress and discussed open topics, objectives, priorities, tasks for the coming month, and risks.
The new Service Standard website has been well received, and quite a number of people have commented on the launch of the update.
We have many ideas for what’s next. The great thing is that those ideas are public – on an open roadmap that everyone can see and interrogate. Feedback buttons are everywhere on the page. We plan to expand on guidance and support significantly. We want to invest in training and workshops. We will adopt the peer review format for the new standard version in the coming weeks, and peer review reports will be integrated and published shortly after.
This week, we also publicly announced the beta version of a new open justice data platform. Together with the Service Standard, the two seem to be the first digital government offerings in the German public sector to have open roadmaps. Of course, I hope I’m wrong, and I have overlooked some offerings. I do not understand why this is not happening more often. It’s not too difficult to open these things up. You just need to explain to stakeholders why it’s beneficial.
New content for @rossferg.bsky.social’s fantastic publicbackroads.xyz collection: We launched 2 new offerings in the past few weeks with open #roadmaps: A. New #ServiceStandard— servicestandard.gov.de/ueber/ B. New open justice data platform— testphase.rechtsinformationen.bund.de/ueber 1/
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 13, 2025 at 3:02 PM
I have pinged Ross, who used to be a fellow head at the UK’s Government Digital Service years back and currently works as a director with Public Digital. He runs a little site on ‘Public sector backlogs and routemaps’. So far, it lists route maps from 6 countries, but Germany has been missing.
On Friday afternoon, a cohort of the new MA program in public design visited our office. They were curious to hear about our organisational mission, setup, work, and they got dedicated overview and introduction of the service standards by my colleague Robert.
Introducing the #ServiceStandard & @digitalservice.bund.de’s work to the next generation of public designers: My colleague Robert welcomed the first cohort of the new MA Public Design programme of Prof Daniela Hensel at @htwberlin.bsky.social to our office this afternoon. Lots of curious questions
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 13, 2025 at 5:32 PM
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While trying to capture some photographs for a refresh information page about the new-ish umbrella brand I realise that the new Service Standard website is the only one that utilises all its 4 building blocks. The umbrella brand has been in pilot mode since December, but the new home for the Service Standard seems be the first instance of all 4 elements in full joint use. It comes with the new unified eagle mark and slim header, runs on the new .gov.de domain, and utilises the KERN design system. Doing so brings together the multi-year efforts of other initiatives, too, hopefully leading to an example of good practice.
Doing more international expert research
What a gift the international government design community is! Talking to international colleagues who have done the work you’re just starting is the absolute best. You can learn from all of their findings, iterations and mistakes.
On Thursday, we had a conversation with Boon who previously has worked on get.gov. He has done plenty of work on government domain management and openly blogged about it. The blog post led us to approach him and schedule a 75-minute expert interview. Again, I did the noting during the interview session.
What we learned probably saved us weeks of work through avoided detours. While just starting work on good domain management, we talked to the folks at GOV.UK and 18F, and the conversations vastly opened our thinking. It feels so good being able to build on other folks’ great work.
My user research colleaugues Sonja and Anja also published a new blog post on how we are professionalising user research in our organisation. In the post, they mention the 3 central tasks of the user research sub discipline at Digital Service:
- supporting project teams to understand user needs
- increasing empathy for users across the public sector
- helping colleagues and project partners integrate user research into their work systemically
They also recount the 4 central goals for 2024 and beyond:
- supporting project teams
- standardising research processes
- building up knowledge management
- promoting inclusive research
Sonja and Anja also gave an overview of a survey on the perception of user research support across the organisation, which we ran in 2023 and 2024. In the post, they also provide an overview of the various formats established, including the research, our training series and the implementation of our repository environment in Condens.
Rather unrelated, Bianca did some terrific poster design work celebrating Pride month in our office. For that, she researched all related public events in Berlin and Brandenburg between June and October. Using coloured paper is a sweet nod to Sonia’s work at GDS from 2017.
Here’s how the Diversity Equity and Inclusion ( #DEI ) working group at @digitalservice.bund.de makes #Pride visible in the office: With colourful mini-posters listing all Pride and #ChristopherStreetDay events in Berlin and Brandenburg between June and Oktober. (Design: Bianca Seidel)
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 12, 2025 at 10:10 AM
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Experiencing access challenges ahead
On Friday late afternoon, I had an unfortunate bike accident. A few hours later I learned that an outer bone in my right hand was broken. For the next 6 to 8 weeks, I will have to wear a cast, and I will be unable to use my dominant hand. So, I will rely on more assistive tech in the coming weeks. Now, I am writing this week note using Apple’s dictation tool.
I expect certain things in my job to be significantly more difficult in the coming weeks. I write a lot: Emails, messages, presentations, and longer texts. I think while I’m writing. Dictating my thoughts is not the same as writing, deleting, rewriting. And using swipe-to-type on the phone’s keyboard seems more suitable and faster than writing single-handedly on the computer. I am unsure if I will be able to write an longer article or blog post in the coming weeks. I will try and report.
Fittingly, I will be giving a talk about our work around accessibility on Tuesday evening during an event organised by Google Germany. I will adopt my intro accordingly.
What’s next
Next week will be busy again.
As mentioned, on Tuesday, I will join Google Berlin’s AI Accessibility Day. It’s a 3-hour event. About 50 to 100 industry leaders are supposed to be joining. I will talk about our ongoing and expanding accessibility work. Other presenters come from IKEA and Zalando as well as Aktion Mensch.
On Wednesday, I will join a meeting of different public sector units who develop their own design systems. We will meet at the GovTech Campus nearby.
On Thursday, we will have our discipline’s summer onsite, for which I will still have to prepare 2 inputs.