Inclusion ‘by Design’ in Digital Transformation
After starting my career exploring applications of social innovation in various domains, and implementing innovation in the public, private and social sectors in Canada, I decided to join the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) MPA programme. Through this short blog, I reflect on some of the concepts we are learning about in our Digital Transformation module, particularly pushing beyond the idea of designing for users, and making government digital services inclusive of all citizens.
What is really interesting with the way modules are organized in my second term, is the crossover of concepts and the plurality of perspectives. Through Creative Bureaucracies, Transformation by Design and Civic Design, I get to learn about the role governments have to play in delivering services, the various organizational strategies and participatory design methodologies to shape public spaces and services.
Digital Transformation focuses on a slightly more “tech” angle, borrowing from start-up and agile language and methodologies. This reminds me of the work we were doing at Desjardins Lab and our collaborations with the Digital Studio, which applied these methodologies to roll out new services and functionalities, always with the user in mind. While I truly see the benefit of many of these methodologies in delivering a MVP and iterating to match the needs of users, I keep wondering if these approaches sometimes have a risk of missing radical inclusion of all citizens, particularly those who are not digitally connected. How can governments, who have public purpose at the heart of their mission, adapt these methodologies to be radically inclusive by design, from the start of the process?
Public vs. Private: why inclusion is key
I have been a fan of Prof. Henry Mintzberg’s work for years, so I was delighted to dive back into some of his work and this 1996 article, “Managing Government, Governing Management” in HBR, which now seems so visionary for its time. In this piece, he differentiates important nuances between what it means to be a “customer” or “client” versus a “citizen” or “subject”, and the huge difference in both the expectations of citizens and the role of governments in comparison to the private sector when it comes to providing public services. He was an early critic of the New Public Management movement, which advocates for the application of market concepts to the management of government. While it is acceptable for businesses to design for a certain ‘persona’ or target customer, especially as they develop MVPs, it is crucial that governments design from a place of radical inclusion, to include all citizens and particularly the most vulnerable. This does not discount the pertinence of agile methodologies and building services in increments, but rather calls for particular attention to be paid to inclusiveness in the early steps of the design.
“Government as a Platform”
“Government as a Platform” is a term Tim O’Reilly coined in 2010, in the rather early days of Facebook. While there are obvious reasons why this approach is extremely beneficial, including the optimization that sharing digital infrastructure provides (highlighted for example by Mike Bracken in this article), one question stayed with me. What happens to those who do not or cannot contribute to the platform? Take Facebook, Instagram: the value of the platform is created and enhanced as users create content. What if governments come to increasingly rely on the information of these platforms to inform the design of new services? Does it de facto exclude those who were not able to participate, and further risk marginalizing them?
Montréal has been at the heart of recent AI development. Being quite involved in both the startup and social innovation communities, I have participated in many discussions around the ethics of AI and biases of datasets (i.e. with AI on a social mission) or acted as jury for the AI 4 Good Lab. One of the most important things that stayed with me from these experiences is how important and intentional the design of technologies is — and how important it is to be looking for blind spots.
One of the first examples I remember hearing about, that I am still sharing to this day, is that of Boston’s Streetbump app - Kate Crawford captures the problem well in this article. As people with lower income were less likely to have smartphones, or capture data while driving on the roads (less likely to have a car as well), datasets were missing for significant parts of the population. Too quick of an analysis of the app’s data could have led to identifying and prioritizing the neighbourhoods in which data was received, leaving holes in datasets (and roads!) in lower income neighbourhoods, which disproportionately affects more marginal communities.
Accessing the Digital Space
The issue of digital inclusion is two-fold: it can be caused by an issue of access to the right infrastructure — device, or network (see broadband issues in Canada!) — or an issue of digital literacy. In France, a 2020 report from the Senate highlights that 14 million French citizens are not proficient in digital skills, while 1 out of 2 is not comfortable with digital tools. While great programs and initiatives exist to reduce the digital divide (see for example France’s Société Numérique), service designers and digital teams in government need to design services with inclusion of all citizens, and marginalized populations in mind.
Earlier this week, we had the chance to tune in to an enrichment lecture by Lesley-Ann Noel on emancipatory design and learned about the Designer’s Critical Alphabet, which helps raise critical questions around positionality and inclusion. Throughout the term, I will seek to critically engage with the content in the Digital Transformation module with this important lens of radical inclusion.