Kategorie: Weeknote

The week before the general election in Germany, Martin contributed an article to Süddeutsche Zeitung Dossier comparing current developments in the UK and the US, reflecting on what Germany’s new government can learn from it. He also worked on objectives for the first six months and how the updated Service Standard should look.

In week 145, Martin worked on a skill framework for content design, sketched future Service Standard touchpoints and dwelled on the polar opposite approaches to digital government that the UK and US currently offer.

Martin participated in Demo Day in his week 144 at Digital Service. He also joined the final working session for DIN SPEC 66336, in which the foundation of the updated Service Standard was passed.

In week 142 at Digital Service, Martin participated in an offsite with his head of delivery colleagues. He also offered an inspirational outlook for the user research practice at Digital Service. Martin also got a blog post published and worked on another plus other submissions.

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.