Lockdown rules differ across the UK and are set by different, overlapping layers of government — UK, devolved, local. The result is it’s hard to understand what the current rules are for any given location. GOV.UK lists the rules for England, set by the UK government only, not those set by the devolved administrations or local authorities.
Business over a certain size have been made to write risk assessments about the measures they are taking to keep staff and the public safe. They have been asked to publish these, but it seems few have, and those that have are mostly…
I just listened to Rishi Sunak’s announcement about the first steps towards restarting the economy and getting people back to work. I can’t comment on the economics of it (beyond the size of the numbers), but I think there are a few digital policy gaps that will need filling:
- To close the policy feedback loop, the government will need much better data about what types of jobs are being created and where. It can get some of this from job adverts, but that’s not enough on its own. …
The UK government’s aim to use digital to grow the economy as we learn to live with COVID-19 is probably the right one. But will policymakers go looking in the right place for growth?
The old policy framings of regulation vs deregulation, central vs local, public vs private are increasingly invalid. A focus on ‘more digital’, or ‘more data sharing’ could mean a growth agenda fails on its own terms.
The real opportunity of digital is in the reduction in administrative burden across every part of society. The automation of the mundane everywhere. The move from transactional to real-time. …
This is a quick blog post to write up some ideas from a conversation between Dan Barrett and Richard Pope about how civil society organisations can better work together on data.
To respond to the COVID19 crisis, dedicated teams across central, local and devolved governments are developing new services and making changes to existing ones, all at great speed. This includes everything from transactional services like the NHS’s “Get an isolation note” service, to complex federated efforts like “Get coronavirus support as a clinically extremely vulnerable person”. Shortly it could include contact-tracing services that raise significant civil liberties and equality…
Anatomy of trust — designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
The Zen of Python
How do we know that things work?
How are scientific experiments verified? Since the 17th century, it’s been via the publication of the results, along with a description of how to replicate the experiment, in a peer-reviewed journal.
How about the regulations that keep us safe? The ones that keep our water drinkable and our cars from crashing. How does society verify that those regulations are being met? Well, the relevant government authority probably conducts inspections and then publish reports listing any breaches of regulations. A government environment agency, for example, might publish data on…
I completed my fellowship at digitalHKS last month, so this is a final update for this project…
A reminder
My name is Richard Pope and I was a 18/19 senior fellow at digitalHKS. digitalHKS is focused on understanding the relationship between digital technology, data, and rights as it relates to the public interest. it is based at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Government as a Platform Playbook
Based on interviews with people from digital service groups around the world, this playbook aims to provides teams who are building platforms in government with actionable guidance.
Government as a Platform — the hard problems
A series on the bigger political/policy questions…
Government as a Platform is the approach of reorganizing the work of government around a network of shared APIs and components, open-standards and canonical data registers. The hope is that this will allow public servants, businesses, and others to deliver radically better services to the public, and to do so safely, efficiently, democratically, and in a more accountable way. This article is part of a series looking at some of the difficult design, policy and technology questions posed by the Government as a Platform concept.
Who should operate digital identity systems and how many should there be?
Digital identity is often thought of in terms of a singular system — a single…
Government as a Platform is the approach of reorganizing the work of government around a network of shared APIs and components, open-standards and canonical data registers. The hope is that this will allow public servants, businesses, and others to deliver radically better services to the public, and to do so safely, efficiently, democratically, and in a more accountable way. This article is part of a series looking at some of the difficult design, policy and technology questions posed by the Government as a Platform concept.
The meme of ‘data sharing’ is too successful
The narrative about “better data sharing” in government is strong (in 2019, a search on…
Government as a Platform (GaaP) has come to mean many things to many people since the publication of the article with that title by Tim O’Reilly in 2011.¹ These include a route to better public services; the breaking down of organizational silos; as a toolkit for civil servants; an open platform to build upon; as new public infrastructure; a short-hand for co-production of policy; and paving the way for new institutions that are fit for the digital age.
In much the same way that the term ‘smart cities’ is used to cover everything from parking apps to delivery robots and…
Digital service units along the lines of the UK’s Government Digital Service and Italy’s Team per la Trasformazione Digitale, are springing up in government departments around the world and at all levels of government. With this has come an exchange of ideas, ways of working, people and, increasingly, code and standards.
Some of this is happening informally, through networks, as can be seen from looking at similarities between the digital service standards and playbooks of different countries, or following code being forked between agencies on GitHub. There are also organizations like FutureState, MOSIP and the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions…
