I quickly made name badges as a few of us went out to do some pop-up research this week. Talking to our users is the best as it shortens hypothetical conversations we have internally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Monday morning started with a visit from Taiwan. Ann Cathrin from LOAD<\/a> coordinated a little tour for Hao-Ting from PDIS<\/a>, who\u2019s working at the Taiwanese government\u2019s Public Digital Innovation Space<\/a>. I had not met her before, but we had various colleagues of Hao-Ting join us for International Design in Government<\/a> conferences and community calls over the last 5 years. She has been working as a design lead but effectively does a lot of citizen and especially youth engagement work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after quite a few workshops, talks and direct conversations with people working for PDIS, I still have a limited understanding of how they actually work, how they measure their work and evidence of their impact. Their model of a Participation Officers Network<\/a>, a.k.a. change and public engagement agents in all of Taiwan\u2019s ministries, is noteworthy. And one thing they are working on, too, is ensuring that their working models continue even if PDIS stops to exist one day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n De-risking and future-proofing your efforts and ways of working is essential in innovative government \u2013 as, with any change of government, critical work could be stopped<\/a> by a signature of a person at the top without a fundamental idea of what you are doing. We had seen that when Denmark\u2019s MindLab disappeared overnight<\/a>. And the various changes in Australia\u2019s DTA<\/a> have been another warning sign. So PDIS approach is considerate and forward-looking. Because you never know how a reasonably new, and therefore fragile, unit might be taken on another course or stopped entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Monday afternoon, we ran our latest next community call. My GDS colleague Paloma organised it. We discussed content design in government and heard from the Government of Cyprus about their work on various services in collaboration with GDS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n