Autor: Martin Jordan

Martin’s first working week of 2025 was a bit rocky. He spent time with staffing, ran a workshop with talent acquisition colleagues and got a podcast with a conversation about his work published.

Martin spent the last days of 2024 and the first few days of 2025 on vacation. Before returning to work, he wrote 25 hopes for 2025. They come in various sizes.

Martin takes the week of Christmas to reflect and highlight the 10 things he is most grateful for and proud of in 2024.

In the last working week of 2024, week 138, Martin co-ran an onsite event for the design and user research discipline. Two dozen people came together for an exchange, retrospective and vision board exercise. Martin also finished some blog posts but left some others unfinished.

In week 136, Martin participated in another co-writing session for a standardisation specification linked to the updated Service Standard. He witnessed the German government’s new umbrella brand launch and talked to UK colleagues from FCDO and CDDO about better policy design.

In week 135, Martin saw some end-to-end testing for civil court claims taking place. He invited other public sector colleagues working on common service components to join as observers. Martin got a blog post about the Service Standard peer reviews out and published a related how-to facilitation guide. He also ran a cross-government community gathering on holistic service design and reviewed the standardisation document linked to the updated Service Standard.

Community was key in Martin’s week 134 at Digital Service. He attended the NExT network’s annual conference to exchange with other community leads. He also joined cross-government accessibility specialists and gave a talk about his ongoing efforts to make services accessible for all.

In his week 133 at Digital Service, Martin co-ran a workshop on the updated Service Design that is in the works. He participated in a review session of the final report on the learning clusters of digital strategy’s lighthouse project. He also looked at how many people in the design and user research discipline work part-time.

Week 132 was an odd one for Martin. While German governemt fell apart, he watched the first Service Standard peer review of an external service offering. He co-hosted a meetup with civic tech projects presenting, and he co-ran his annual Public Service Lab conference.