Posters are up, people read the pre-read, and a few questions are collected. Next week, we have an admired guest speaker joining us for an hour. Marty Cagan, co-founder of Silicon Valley Product Group, public speaker and serial book author, will talk about his experience building products, the organisations behind and their culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mini poster for the office space is inspired by my former colleague Laurence\u2019s Swiss grid events posters from a few years ago<\/a>. They were just too lovely to be ignored. So, I told him, and he said some of Facebook\u2019s internal posters inspired them. So, we are all building on each others\u2019 work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s vital for us at Digital Service to stay in sync with the private sector and academia, not only other public sector organisations around the globe. It matters on an organisational level but equally on a personal level \u2013 to be inspired and engaged while some work we do might be slow and arduous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of this week, I reached a little milestone: Maria, a service designer at the German Pension Insurance<\/a>, and I completed our proposal and operational outline for a new community of practice on user-centred design. This work had stagnated for some months for multiple reasons, but having Maria join me unblocked it. She helped carry it to the finishing line. In the coming weeks, we hope to start the community as part of the NExT network\u2019s existing community framework<\/a>. Their suggested timeframe is about 6 weeks from submission to launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the week, I had several conversations with people from other public sector organisations about how we do user-centred design things, touching on accessibility user research operations and shared design components. Lots of these conversations could be much more channelled with established cross-organisational communication channels that don\u2019t rely on email and some shared knowledge base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next week, we have an exchange with other user researchers from public sector organisations, including the state-government IT supplier Dataport and the Federal Printing Office. I hope some joint efforts grow from this initial conversation. Ideally, they should be tied into the future NExT community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our small user research channel, we also discussed the position of Joe Tomlinson, Professor of Public Law at the University of York, who argued for government to publish most of its user research for the public good. There would be various benefits, and, of course, it would align with our \u2018open by default\u2019 approach. However, given the additional work, it would have to be argued and agreed upon with budget holders early. It cannot be a mid-project afterthought.<\/p>\n\n\n\nProgressing community work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n