Talks

Great to be back at the Greenbelt Festival again a couple of weeks ago. I’m often involved behind the scenes at the festival, but this year Kester invited Hannah and I to join him for an AI-inspired panel. His write-up was: In the late 1950s, Marv Minsky, one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, excitedly turned to a colleague and gushed, “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!”“You’re going to do all that for the machines?” his colleague replied. “What are you going to do for the people? ...

I was in Singapore last week for the Digital Public Goods Alliance Annual Members Meeting, with Public Digital colleague Sechi Kailasa. It was good to feel the energy of the community and see it growing with the addition of Asian Development Bank (ADB), Open Future Foundation and the Government of Uruguay/AGESIC. It was great to see more emphasis on building capability better policy environments in government, and making smarter use of the private sector support. A highlight for me was joining Ambassador Nele Leosk from Estonia, Vice-Minister Armando J. Manzueta Peña Manzuela from Dominican Republic and Aura Cifuentes from Co-Develop for a discussion on making change happen in government as part of the D"igital Public Goods for Digital Public Infrastructure" (DPG4DPI) track. ...

Contributing to the final day of the World Bank’s “Climate Smart Public Finance” conference in Cairo, Lauren Kahn and I presented some of what we’ve learned from the past decaces of digital transformation that can aid green transition. We looked at how starting small, scaling what works and building movements are as relevant to the daunting challenges of the green transition as they’ve been for successful digital initiatives. More on the event on the World Bank site ...

It was a pleasure to join Dr. Geeta Mazur, Digital Minister of Morroco; Gerardo Una from the IMF; and Amanda Walker for a discussion about inclusive growth and digital transformation at the 2023 IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Marrakech. We talked about the importance of thinking beyond technology to get to integrated views of change, the need for whole of government strategies (and good examples of those) but also the importance of not starting with everything. ...

I spoke to introduce and frame this inaugural event for the ODI and public digital Digital Public Finance Hub, presenting alongside Emily, Cathal and Marco to introduce some of the themes from our working papers on what we see as an emerging (and vital) paradigm for public financial management. Videos and other content from the event are available at ODI’s event website

Around the world there’s growing interest in Digital Public Infrastructure - the way that governments and societies can build strong digital foundations - and Digital Public Goods that help us share the best practices, standards and code that support it. Together these tools should help solve wicked societal problems like financial inclusion, public services, benefits, etc at scale and speed. Examples from India’s Aadhaar to the Open Banking standards that started in the UK to Brazil’s new payments systems have driven thinking about digital platforms and infrastructure to the top of the agenda of the G20 the UN and many other bodies. Viraj Tyagi of the eGov Foundation and James Stewart of Public Digital will discuss the developments they’re seeing, the importance of the agile community and how the community can connect with the work. ...

We’re growing used to talking about the importance of autonomous, high performing teams, and of bringing different technical disciplines together. But most organisations are more than their technology, and delivering great services requires organisations’ operations, policy, strategy and other functions to pull in the same direction. Drawing on experiences of bringing together teams across a broad range of disciplines in the UK and globally, James Stewart will look at why now is the time to really think multi-disciplinary and what some of the foundations are for much more inclusive digital work.) ...

I presented our paper on Fixing digital funding in government in a webinar for the Institute of Citizen Centric Services in Canada. I drew out parallels in other fields, but particularly focused on the transition that many digital teams are making from insurgents to establishment, with funding reform as the biggest bureaucratic hurdle.

Emma Gawen and I joined FWD50’s Alistair Croll for a discussion of our report on creating conditions for success with open source in government. We touched on striking a balance between open and proprietary solutions; the leadership approaches needed for open source to thrive, and debunking some of the myths of “free” software. You can watch the session on the FWD50 website.

As part of the extended FWD50 programme, Emma Gawen and I ran an in depth look at how to de-risk an organization’s digital transformation. We looked at things like: Questions for non-technologists to ask about your tech Why you should start small, and scale what works Understand when to work with in house teams, suppliers or both Know what questions to ask of your digital transformation work to ensure it’s on track and meeting needs You can watch the session via Access FWD50 ...