When in town, say ‘Hi!’ – has been my rule for some time.
On Thursday, while in Riga, I met with Sergejs from the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development of the Republic of Latvia.
Each government is different, but most face many of the same challenges. That’s what I learn in every new conversation. Yet everyone finds some unique ways to deal with their challenges.
Collecting ideas internationally
Meeting new people means meeting new ideas. And with the countless obstacles we face working on government transformation, we cannot have enough ideas. I gladly take all the ideas I can get and remix them. New ideas give us input for trying things differently in our environment. As agents of change dealing with plenty of dark matter, we never know what works or what sticks.
Tried-and-tested ideas from elsewhere let us take shortcuts, at least sometimes. After stumbling upon an 18F blog post by Boon Sheridan about the research and design work on get.gov last year, I reached out to him and Cameron Dixon at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Together with their colleagues, they helped us save weeks of working hours. They generously shared the many things they had learned and trialled for get.gov. My colleague Lena and I were in awe because of their demonstrated maturity and generosity. Their work directly informs some of the processes and website features we are developing for gov.de. You will soon see what we proudly nicked from them.
My moments of saying ‘Hi!’ out of the blue have always been rewarding. In summer 2017, when in Lisbon for holidays, I messaged Paulo Malta, then senior advisor to the Minister of Presidency and Administrative Modernization. He agreed to meet me for afternoon coffee and shared his wisdom. I learnt about LabX and Portugal’s experimental approach to public administration. Since then, this has become almost a habit.
Last autumn, when visiting Paris, I reached out to Emilie and Eva at the OECD. We only ‘knew’ each other from LinkedIn. I got to stop by for a Friday lunch exchange, and I took plenty of notes. There was so much good food for thought. I was then invited to return for a working group gathering on life events just weeks later. That is where I met Sergejs – in a hands-on workshop on designing services along life events. That’s where we picked things up yesterday afternoon.
From Sergejs, I learned how they actively support local government to bring over 700 services online, utilising form builders where capability and capacity are low, and sharing patterns across municipalities to reduce duplication. We discussed Latvia’s roughly 90% fulfilment rate for cross-European service and data integration in line with the EU’s Single Digital Gateway regulation. That’s a number Germany couldn’t be further away from. Looking ahead, we debated proactive service and the architectural changes Latvia has been proposing for its future tech stacks. And I learned about government tax chatbots sharing recipes when citizens ask for them.
Make some new work friends, exchange ideas whenever you can, and make your life a little easier by applying their ideas in your context!
Doing managerial things
I spent more time on salary cycle conversations and also staffing matters. Performance review season continues to take a lot of time at the moment and will do so well into June.
I also continued interviewing content design candidates. We now have one confirmed candidate who has signed their contract and will start on 1 July. With well over 100 applications, we have received a good response. But sheer numbers don’t mean that every candidate is qualified. Many candidates do not consider the role requirements. So we are not interviewing more than 10% of the applicants.
The longer the role remains open, the more internal demand it creates, too. That is at least my perception. Based on what the teams tell us, we might be able to hire up to 3 content designers in total. I hope that enough candidates in our pipeline make it through the interview process.
Discussing brand and design system development
I supported the work of communication designer Bianca and a few others as they explored design variations for the landing page of the starting-a-business service. It is currently in development, and it will need a start page.
While start pages are a solved pattern that we consistently apply on service.justiz.de, this will launch outside of an existing platform or portal. There seems to be little appetite within government for using bund.de and the Federal portal, which is understandable but also unfortunate. Also, since KERN via designsystem.gov.de doesn’t yet offer robust page templates, we will have to invent some things here. With some questions of preference and taste arising, we are looking at how far the range of designs can go.
I also joined a longer call with colleagues from the KERN design system in the State of Schleswig-Holstein and the government IT provider Dataport. We discussed the current value proposition, design gaps and the direction of travel. We explored alternative design routes from a governance and narrative angle. We need to ensure that the digital umbrella brand and related design system offer enough range to fulfil the communicative needs of different public sector entities.
There is work to do, and I will address this issue at an upcoming coordination group meeting.
What’s next
As we get close to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I have almost completed our 2-year-later blog post. It’s well beyond 1,000 words already. I still need to take the pictures to illustrate it. I plan to do that early next week. We will publish the post next Thursday.
We are almost set for an interactive 3-hour session on Thursday morning. I have little to do; Marion and Joshua will cover everything from our side. I’ll watch the chat and answer people’s questions where I can. For my spirit, it was helpful that I co-ran the introduction to accessibility together with Marion again this week. It had been a while. Doing it again refreshed my memory on some aspects.
Earlier in the week, I will support my colleague, Nadine, in shaping a talk she is preparing for Service Design Drinks Berlin. It will be about the role of design in shaping data and public infrastructure.