I returned to the CityLAB Summer Conference. I attend it every 2 years, it turns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I joined it in June 2022, where Charlotte and I talked about service design for government<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I then rejoined in June 2024 to report on how we are transforming justice services<\/a>, alongside my colleague Caro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year, I teamed up with Thomas Bendig, senior policy officer at the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our 25-minute talk gave an overview of our most recent work, which we do jointly and in service of the ministry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The talk was titled \u2018Services that work and build trust: with Service Standard and umbrella brand\u2019. We started with the problem: showing examples of services that aren\u2019t very good and how they are perceived by users, and discussed in the press. Then we illustrated how one framework ensures teams are doing the right thing, and the other helps users identify what an actual state offering is. Thomas mostly covered the Service Standard. I spoke about the umbrella brand and its promise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The talk was well received. The room was packed with people standing. We had over 60 attendees, of whom some had to squeeze into the room. The 3 questions we had time for were not unexpected. People wanted to know whether things are mandatory: whether usability tests are mandatory, whether the design system could become mandatory, and how mandatory the Service Standard is overall. Some people asked from a position of hope and support, others from the perspective of compliance and enforcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stayed for much of the day and especially enjoyed both Professor Birgit Mager\u2019s and Merici Vinton\u2019s talks, which offered great insight into service transformation in large, slow-moving environments. I hope local government leaders took notes on utilising user-centred design for transformative change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On other things Service Standard: I spent 2 hours with designers Linda and Sabrina on Friday afternoon to rework the introductory service design training. Instead of running it as a nice-to-have side activity inside of Digital Service, we are now folding it into our package of activities around the Service Standard. It will allow us to open it up to more colleagues and scale it across government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also had an exchange with colleagues at the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency this week after receiving a somewhat out-of-the-blue email. They shared their thoughts on \u2018The future of citizen dialogue in Norway\u2019 with us. They reached out after reading my colleague\u2019s blog post about our work on the umbrella brand<\/a>. They are the unit driving digital transformation in the Norwegian government. They look after shared websites, common components, a form builder, a design system, and design patterns around life events. We shared some of our ongoing work, and so did they. We both were convinced that the others were ahead with their work. This angle is never right, as we have rather different circumstances that allow us to progress in different areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would like to hear more from them and also see them share their work with the international community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The night before CityLAB\u2019s big event, we hosted our own small one, together with them. We ran the 13th edition of our public-facing meetup. This time it took place in our office again. And we moved back up to the top floor, so that people could enjoy the rooftop, given the weather.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSpeaking about quality-enforcing standards<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Enquiring about money and taxes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n