Weeknote 4.0
Future technology, explained
Putting aside everything else that has happened this week…
The most important development was us publishing our first explainer on future technology in government, led by Marcus Shepheard. We wanted to pull together something which gave an overview of what it is we (and others) are talking about, how the UK government is approaching some of the issues, and some examples of where future technology is being deployed — here and abroad.
The process of pulling the explainer together prompted a lot of useful conversations:
- How do we best group together different technologies? What frameworks — come on, we’re a thinktank, we live for frameworks — are useful? We used the Government Digital Service’s Services, Process, Regulatory, Policy, Technology framework in the explainer. Brookings’ informational, transactional, operational one is interesting. And we’ve been playing around with another one: technologies which can learn and react, technologies which manage information, infrastructure technologies which serve as platforms for other technologies, physical devices which interact with the real world/each other, and technologies which simulate and visualise alternate scenarios and realities. What do you think? Seen any other useful ones?
- How do you define some of the key terms? Do you start where others are starting, even though the usage of words is sometimes wrong? For example, we’ve heard ‘RPA’ — robotic process automation — being used in quite a few places which sound like automation rather than the more specific RPA meaning.
- How do we usefully learn from other countries, where political systems and the nature of government can be very different?
- And how do we decide which examples of future technology in government have been successful, or not?
I suppose we should do some sort of project to answer all those questions *thinking face emoji*
Three things that happened this week
1. As well as publishing our explainer, Lewis Lloyd has also updated our glossary with some new terms. Are there any other terms we should be including (thanks to Elliot Jones for suggesting a few already), or any definitions you don’t agree with?
2. We’re also working on a spreadsheet of examples of future technology being used in government. Expect to see more of that next week.
3. We opened booking for our next Data Bites event, on Tuesday 4 June. Come along! You’ll hear from William Priest, the chief executive of the Geospatial Commission; BEIS, who’ll be talking about how technology allows them to apply new solutions to old problems; the ONS, who’ll be talking about data on the web; and the National Audit Office, who’ll be talking about the challenges of using (and sharing) data across government, before they publish a new report on the subject. Watch the previous ones here.
People we chatted to
- Gavin was one of a number of IfGers presenting to the Hertie School of Government, summarising the IfG’s previous work on digital government as well as this project
- Our colleagues! Today we ran a ‘coffee and cakes’ session outlining what we’re doing, how we’re working in the open, and asking for a) examples of future technology in government and b) what they’d be interested in us finding out.
What we’re reading and thinking about
- Gavin’s not had too much time to think this week, between Data Bites, speaking on an Advertising Association panel about trust (which touched a lot on data sharing), keeping track of resignations and reshuffles, catching up with some open data legends (Dan Barrett and Giuseppe Sollazzo), sending a weekly newsletter, and thinking about pulling together some speakers for the Orwell Foundation’s tech and politics residency at the Barbican on the subject of Utopia and Dystopia (ideas welcome!). Though he has been thinking about the principles we apply in public life and how they can be applied (or could be altered) by future technology, prompted by this consultation on the Nolan Principles, our Data Bites discussion on government’s data ethics framework, and being reminded of the Bingham principles (he was still running the Orwell Prize when the late Lord Bingham won) and how they can be applied to decision-making. Do our discussions about algorithmic bias (etc) also force us to think about how humans currently make decisions?
- Marcus caught up with various people at the Digital Government 2019 conference in Westminster. A particular highlight was the presentation by Andrus Kaarelson, Director of State Information Systems at the Estonian Information Systems Authority. He’s been thinking about the Government’s profession capability frameworks (for example) and what these say about the work that civil servants do.
- Lewis finally got going with Jamie Susskind’s Future Politics, months after he came in and did an event with us. He seems to slightly overstate the likely pace of technological change (imho!), but the book’s chock full of ideas, lucidly argued — and serves as a fun bit of political theory revision…
What’s coming up next week?
- Marcus is on leave, Parliament’s in recess. Westminster will no doubt serve up more drama, though…
Any last thoughts?
- As ever, hit us up with any thoughts or feedback! Email (digital@instituteforgovernment.org.uk) or Twitter or commenting on this or whatever works best for you — it all works for us.
Originally published at https://weeknot.es on May 24, 2019.
