Digital Government: developments in Argentina

As part of my new role over in New Zealand I’ve been keeping an eye on digital government developments internationally. This week, news from Argentina caught my eye. I can’t find much in English about it, so here’s a short summary of what I found.

As of January this year, Daniel Abadie was appointed Secretary for Digital Government, under the Ministry of Modernisation. Both the post and the Ministry are new, part of Mauricio Macri’s reforms. The Ministry is charged with building a state for the 21st Century: transparent, inclusive and serving people. He and the team look like they are off to a great start.

Open Government

They have launched a National Strategy for Open Government (La Estrategia Nacional de Gobierno Abierto) and a public data portal: http://datos.gob.ar/. Publication of data will be gradual, and the aim is to include information on contracting, administrative budgets and salary scales for officials among other things.

Open Source

They’ve also launched the official profile of Argentina in Github, where they plan to release open source projects from the Ministry of Modernisation. In the first 100 days they will be working on defining content standards, design and usability for government sites, aiming to build better services for citizens.

Principles of Digital Services

In draft on Github, I was particularly interested to see their draft Principles of Digital Services, which set out the work culture for National Directorate of Digital Services. No co-incidence that they have similarities with the original GDS Design Principles. I relied on google translate, so excuse any mishaps in translation.

We prioritize the needs of citizens

We talk with citizens, we observe their contexts, we understand what they need beyond what they say. Our developments always aim to address these needs.

We design from the data

We take design decisions based on the collection and analysis of objective parameters, including usage metrics platforms, usability and performance indicators.

We understand all channels of each service

The use of a service can be given through a website, a phone call or waiting for a turn in an office. We design thinking of the full experience.

We build simple to use services

Each service has a simple user experience for citizens, even though the processes and systems are complex.

We build accessible services

We care that the quality of services is equal for all citizens of the country, offsetting personal, geographic and technological difficulties.

Build digital services by default

Services and procedures designed to be used over the Internet, from any device.

We work in an open, transparent and collaborative way

We share what we analyze, design and develop. Both for use inside the team, as for the rest of government and society.

We work in a coordinated and integrated way

To show citizens the national government as a single entity, we will integrate services from different areas under a single identity.

We work on short and progressive cycles

We plan our work on services in gradual iterations to add features make changes. That way we show results frequently and have the opportunity to correct problems.

Better tools for Civil servants

Finally, it was reported that at Davos in January President Mauricio Macri and Sheryl Sandberg made an agreement for public sector bodies to start using Facebook at Work. Dan Abadie explained in an interview that they wanted to explore solutions that enhance teamwork and support horizontal structures. It will be piloted for no more than a year, first to civil servants working on innovation and open government. Experience from the UK says that giving civil servants modern tools to do their jobs is essential to supporting cultural change and delivering digital transformation, so this is one to watch.

If you speak more Spanish than me, check out the team’s official page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ARGobDigital/timeline

Really looking forward to seeing this progress.