To be honest my head has been all over the place this year and a side effect of that has been my bookmarking has gone to hell and so this is a bit light this year — still I’m trying to get back on the blogging horse so here we go!
Blogger of the year
I enjoyed a lot of what Steve Messer wrote on his brilliantly named blog this year. Also Sam Villis had a great year leading the #weeknotes community from the front (which continued to grow — especially in the local gov and NHS communities.)
I really enjoyed a lot of Scott Colfer’s writing this year — I admire his thoughtful approach to public service product management (even if I don’t agree with it all.)
Over all though my favourite blogger of the year was Anna Shipman — who wrote a steady stream of brilliant posts and book reviews around the topic of (digital) strategy and leadership that I found myself returning to time and again.
Blogpost of the year
I’ve definitely read fewer posts than usual this year but the one that has stuck with me (albeit it was only in October!) was from Rachel Coldicutt — Just Enough Internet.
I think it is a call to action and manifesto for the ‘public service internet’ and one we should all heed.
Event (and talk) of the year
I was lucky enough to go to a bunch of great events this year — an amazing Govcamp to start the year. Service Design in Government was great (though I indulged a bit much in the Edinburgh hospitality!). One Team Gov Global in Victoria was a really special experience.
That said getting to go to the Code for America Summit was an inspiring couple of days and hearing from the Ear Hustle team was a particular highlight.
Comeback of the year
Having Dan Hon back to writing a regular newsletter was a real, unexpected bonus this year. Apart from all the Snow Crash posts ;)
Twitter storms of the year
This is a tie between the storms around Amazon and NHS ‘data’ and Dom Cummings and GOV.UK ‘data’. So pretty data centric. Jeni wrote a great post about the NHS stuff and I wrote a bit about Dom (and linked to smarter articles.) Two big takeaways — (1) they could have both been handled better if the organisations/teams involved worked in the open a bit more and weren’t so opaque about things (2) in both cases most of the ‘hot takes’ focused on the wrong things and missed the really worrying trends under the surface.
Team of the year
I’ve particularly been a fan of what the gang at Croydon have been doing. They have been hiring some great people, working in the open and displaying a fun feistiness in their public persona. Local gov is an exciting place to be these days and I’ve enjoyed watching this.
My friends and colleagues at FutureGov have been killing it with their work on FamilyStory — exactly the sort of piece of public good project many of us get in to this work to do but never see!
My team of the year though is the Customer Journey team at Citizens Advice. They are at the sharp end of public interest work these days more than ever and they have been undertaking an ambitious transformation in recent years and are increasingly making big bets and talking about them openly and honestly. 21st Century working at its finest.
