I had a short and intense but entertaining week. I only worked 2 days out of London and took the remaining days off to see art and design exhibitions and meet former colleagues and friends. And I went to my trusted hairdresser George on Essex Road, who knows my head best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Monday, I worked from a nearly empty GDS office in Whitechapel. From there, I delivered our discipline onboarding to the May and June new starters and refined the draft of our OKRs for the quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At GDS, I also spent time with Kara and Paloma planning next week\u2019s panel discussion on \u201cThe long slog of public service transformation\u201d<\/a>. We will hear from 3 community members: \u00dclly from Estonia\u2019s Ministry of Education, Marco from Italy\u2019s Team Digitale, and from Laurence, who worked with governments around the world. We drafted 5 guiding questions for the panel discussion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kara also walked me through the deck she presented at UX Scotland later in the week \u2013 on \u201cThe power of communities of practice: How communities can make your work and working life better\u201d<\/a>. It captures much of the essence and distils the content from other decks, talks, and discussions. As the talk was recorded, I hope it will be shared shortly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the way back from London to Berlin for 9 hours via Eurostar and Intercity Express trains, I wrote the draft of a new blog post titled \u201cCommunities of practice: catalysts for effective government transformation\u201d. The blog post gives an overview of the local, national and international public sector community that others and I are doing. It will be a good account of the efforts of the last year and what\u2019s to come. I am aiming to get the German and English versions of the post out at a similar time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the late evening and night hours, Katrin and I finished another community project: the latest issue of the Service Gazette. We always need a deadline and picked next week\u2019s Creative Bureaucracy Festival<\/a> as the anchor for the latest German edition. With a clear goal in sight, we worked with the help of all contributors through the review of the pages. Maintaining a little thumbnail document of all previews covers since 2015, I found a colour combination that again felt different. And while I think I should redesign the layout at some point, it feels like it has not aged too much in the past 8 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n