Weeknotes E35

Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working at the Department of Health and Social Care. Each week I’m going to keep a running update of the work I’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.

My current priority:

Supporting the Healthy Start private beta and a helping hand in the Healthy Start vitamins discovery

Some interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…

Show and tell

Another sprint, another show and tell. All going well and it’s ALWAYS best to show the thing. I’m very proud about how open and transparent the team continue to be.

Responsible Tech Conference

I spent Thursday at Doteveryone’s first responsible tech conference.

I found it extremely stimulating. I rarely take l&d opportunities and never actually do the 10% I stick in my calendar each Friday so to take a day out and just think was really bloody wonderful. Some great things:

• tons of amazing speakers and evidence that there is no excuse for all male panels
• nice space, well ran, provocative speakers but all discussion was constructive

Some thoughts and reflections from the event (I should write a blog post):

• got to remind ourselves, is tech just the symptom of another wider social problem or is it the cause?
• harms of tech are not always immediately obvious, they corrupt over time or get repurposed by unexpected groups to do dark deeds you may never have imagined
• being responsible is a constant effort, you can’t just fill in an ethics form at the beginning of development and it’ll all be fine
• diversity is critical, you need to find ways to get different voices in the room
• we will always have bad actors no matter how much regulations/codes of practice we create. Even with the 10 commandments people sinned.
• “doing bad needs to be bad business”
• there was a debate about can tech be for everyone? My question is can it be for everything? (machines, the environment, etc)
• those in the audience are privileged and we need to be mindful that we are secure enough in life to have the capacity to care about this stuff. It’s easy to convince similar minded people in a lecture hall in central London but making some of this real will require winning the hearts and minds outside of the bubble.

Only drawback was being shamed as an employee of ‘DOH’. Not only is this wrong but it’s also bad copy. I made corrections. Hope to share more thoughts as i’ve made a set of slides for a future show and tell to discuss more about what I learned/mused on.

Contributing to organisational change

I am always very thankful that anyone asks me for feedback and that our organisation is small enough that my contributions get heard. I’m also a fan of trying to be constructive and if I see things I think I can improve then I force myself to say things. This week I said things.

Working with new teams

Looks like a new team in need of help popped up on our radar. I am now going to be thinking about how we can intervene and make their service the best it can be. This might not be easy peasy though.

Greening Digital workshop

A gaggle of public servants have coalesced around making services and products as environmentally friendly as possible. I began thinking about this in more earnest last year, especially as I’m involved with plastic cards and helping teams make things that are sustainable (as a service but also why not environmentally).

I’d already had some chats with NHS Digital colleagues but a bigger group now came together. Shout out to Defra for already doing some really good stuff in this space. Conversations touched on the need to bake it in procurement, the benefits & costs of video-conferencing, departments failures to embed behavioural change in practices with technology.

It was interesting. Lots of people already doing lots of stuff, e.g. there is already commitments for “Green ICT” in the Tech code of practice. My prediction is that one day we have a sustainability point in the service standard/tech code of practice.

What I’ve been reading

1. This is fascinating blog post on building a low-tech website. There are real practical steps we can do to make sites more sustainable.
2. I created a presentation about the future of retail a while ago and it had clips of a raft of new-ish supermarkets popping up. Here is one in Singapore… I await a London, cashless store soon.
3. Former colleague Michael offers an alternative opinion to the norm on how we should be designing for the web.
4. The case for more diversity in health tech, also promoting great sounding schemes in Leeds.
5. Excellent advice on how to reshape offline processes and forms.
6. Extras that should be in the service standard by one of the original authors.
7. Blog post on predictive prevention. Better ask people for their consent to be tracked.
8. .gifs, fake news and “doctored” videos. The truth is out there.