Podcasts about one team gov

I del to av denne serien snakker Silvija og Pia om flere eksempler for kulturendring, både fra offentlig og privat sektor. Her snakker de blant annet om andre som er dyktige innen kulturendring i offentlige temaer, One Team Gov, human centricity og mer. -“Vi vet ikke hva vi ikke vet før vi har prøvd”Dette LØRNER du: Kollektivt lederskapSamfunnsinnovasjon Utvikling av nye måter å jobbe påNye løsninger i offentlig sektorAnbefalt litteratur:Humanocracy - Gary Hamel og Michele Zaninihttps://www.morgenbladet.no/boker/2021/11/26/bragepris-til-lena-lindgren/https://medium.com/oneteamgovhttps://www.oneteamgov.no/prinsipperLiberating structures :https://www.liberatingstructures.com/https://mydata.org/https://www.cw.no/eu-facebook-google/eu-forhandlere-enige-om-historisk-lov-mot-teknologigiganter/1680513https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Pioneers_settlers_town_plannershttps://dfo.no/blogg/hvorfor-er-samordning-sa-vanskelighttps://www.kristiania.no/kunnskap-kristiania/2021/08/tillit-basert-pa-velvilje-gir-okt-innovasjon/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You may have heard of their breakfast meetups, virtual coffees or their unconfernence, and wondered who are they? What do they do? Or perhaps even... why should you care?

Meg speaks to Toby about agile techniques, spitfire aeroplanes and being socially responsible. Transcript Megan Hayward: Hello and welcome to Meet the Team podcast. My name is Meg and I work in our External Communications department. And I'm the host of this series.   I'm here today with Toby. Toby was one of the first people that I met here at Companies House as he was on the panel for my interview. And who better to welcome me?   Thank you for agreeing to be on this podcast. I'm looking forward to learning more about Toby and his role. How are you today?   Toby Maxwell-Lyte: I'm very well. Thank you for inviting me.   MH: You're very welcome. Firstly, can you just tell me your role title and how you fit into the wider team here at Companies House?   TML: Okay, so my role title is the Head of Software Development Profession and so my focus is on the community of people with that skillset within Companies House.   So how does that fit into the wider picture? Our purpose is to actually build the software that then meets users' needs, so that we can then make sure that citizens that need to use our services, whether that's companies who're filing information with us or whether that's members of the public who want to get access to that information, are able to do that via our web services.   MH:  Thank you so much. So I'm not sure if you listened to the previous podcast, but we're going to start with some jokey questions to get going. So, cats or dogs?   TML: Dogs   MH: Tea or coffee?   TML: Coffee   MH: Introvert or extrovert?   TML: Extrovert   MH: Night owl or early bird?   TML: Early bird   MH: Same! Moving on to the proper questions, the serious stuff. Which piece of work are you really proud of?   TML: I think one of the pieces of work I'm most proud of is what we've built over the last couple of years. It's been a project called the Streamlined Company Registration Service. This was a joint project where we worked closely with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to make it easier for people who are setting up new companies. So historically they would've had to tell Companies House that they wanted to incorporate their new company, and then they would independently have needed to register with HMRC for corporation tax and vat and PAYE.   So we've built a service with them that enables people who want to set up their own companies to be able to do that all in one go now, so they're not having to tell multiple different government departments the names and addresses of directors over and over again. It's made it streamlined.   MH: I think that's interesting because it's actually something that I've thought about. And thought, isn't it great how you just do one thing and then HMRC automatically know about it? It's all these things that have to get done but people don't realise. It's fixed before it's broken almost?   TML: Absolutely and that wasn't always the case and I think it's important that we, as government, work across those sorts of organisational boundaries to make sure that we're providing services for citizens that are user-friendly. You know, they're not customers. They can't choose, they're obliged to do it. So it's important that we make it as easy as possible and reduce the friction.   MH: Talking of making it as easy as possible, which brings us on really nicely to One Team Gov. I know you do a lot of work in that area. Could you tell me a little bit about it?   TML: Yeah, One Team Gov formed about 2 years ago. There were a couple of people who were together at a conference and they thought policy and digital were separate things. And wouldn't life be better if those were more joined up? So they formed One Team Gov which is a group of people who want to make things better across government. And it's kind of as vague as that really, it's about doing things well.   So it's working across boundaries. Working across government boundaries or whether it's working across teams within organizations or you know, even globally. So there was a One Team Goes Global unconference event which I helped at, and we had people from over the world. About 40 countries represented.   I found it really interesting to learn from, say people in Canada, about the challenges they were facing. We have our Companies House register here, and in Canada because they have 11 states, they have 11 equivalents of Companies House. And it was interesting to hear the challenges.   There's often people who have solved the problem you're facing already and if you talk to other people you can get their input, and it's nice to be able to get that from other people and also to give back.   MH: Thank you Toby that's great, can we go back to your role? What made you decide that it was the career for you?   TML: I always enjoyed playing around with computers. My dad was always quite keen on buying shiny new kit. So I got exposure to it and got to play with that. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with a career.   So ended up doing a degree in computer science and then naturally went into the world of software development. I quite like working with people. I enjoy the problem-solving side of things, you know, the extrovert question earlier comes into the sort of working with people and that sort of stuff.   I like working with software developers and helping join the gap in terms of making sure that we build software that meets users' needs. I enjoy that sort of stuff, the human side of the role.   MH: You sound like you're really rewarded by your job. Is that true?   TML: Yeah. I enjoy it and I'm always looking to improve. You know, I find it satisfying. There's nothing more satisfying than being able to build just enough software so that you can make peoples' lives a bit better. And yeah, it's great.   MH: Talking about making peoples' lives better, can you tell me a bit about the social responsibility work that you've been doing in digital?   TML: One of the benefits of being in Companies House is that we get a given number of volunteering days that we're allowed to use each year to help with the wider community.   And something I've been involved with is working with a local organization called City Hospice. So that's a hospice in Cardiff. It's a “bedless” hospice, so people don't actually stay in beds, it's like a day centre for people who might be going through different cancer therapy or they might be experiencing other things which they're going through.   This provides a nice environment for people to get out of their house and go and socialise with other people. So what we do there is, once a month we get volunteers from the digital teams to go along and meet with these people and help them with their digital skills.   For example, I went and I met a really nice man. He said to me “I've heard that I can watch videos of Spitfire airplanes flying over Cardiff Bay. Apparently that happened in the 1980s and I'd really like to see a video of that. What can I do?” So I thought okay. So this must be YouTube, so introduced him to that and no doubt he's now gone down in the whole history of watching those videos.   MH: I know that we've done some equipment donations as well, is that to City Hospice?   TML: So that's to some of the local primary schools. Obviously the older our equipment gets, it comes to the point where it's no longer up to scratch for our software development needs and general user needs. Whereas local schools really value that kind of thing. So I know that we've also donated some of our equipment that we don't use anymore to local schools, which is making their lives a bit better.   MH: Can you tell me, are we using any new or creative processes or attitudes towards work and output?   TML: So the primary way that we do our software development is by using agile techniques. That's not particularly new in the software world, but we're doing more and more of that, which is breaking everything down into small chunks and delivering it as often as we possibly can to meet users' needs. And then getting feedback on it so that we can iterate on those services.   We've recently created a platform team here who can help us with some of the more automation of the software release processes. We're moving towards a continuous integration mindset where all the developers code. They combine their code with each other as often as possible to make sure that it's as straightforward as possible and easy for people to work together.   And then it's breaking that stuff down. It's really small chunks so that it gets delivered really frequently because more often, the smaller the chunks the lower the risk and the better we can meet user's needs.   MH: I know I'm repeating myself, but it's just one of those things that you fix before it's broken. People take so much for granted and you get it to this stage, that you have no idea the work that's gone into it to get to there.   TML: Yeah, but I think it's about the smaller the chunks the lower the risks. Yeah, and that means if you release a small piece of software, there's not too much to fix if it's gone wrong. It's really important that we make sure that we can do that.   MH: Can you tell me a little bit about Innovation time?   TML: So historically there's always been quite a strong focus on projects, which is rightly so. We're ultimately spending public money. So that needs to go in the most efficient and effective ways possible.   What we've realized is, we've got a large group of bright and intelligent people and we need to harness the innovation and creativity side of their roles rather than just purely heads down to the grindstone.   We introduced Innovation time which gives people the opportunity to spend half a day a week on doing whatever they want, that they think will make things better.   So an example of one of the things that came out of that was, in our culture community, one of the things that people liked most was meeting people from other areas. People can register for ‘curious coffee' and then you get randomly paired up with somebody from another directorate. And you can go and have a coffee with them and just get to meet.   MH: Being the head of the development software profession means…   TML: For me it's about enabling people to grow within their roles and develop themselves as a person, so that they can become an even better software developer.   It's getting people across the different teams. We've got 13 software development teams. It's getting them to share their great ideas with each other so that if one team over here is doing great stuff, the other teams are aware of that and can learn and gain from that.   How can we make sure that we're doing high-quality software, that's easy to maintain? Which then means that we can add new features to it easily and quickly without incurring technical debt and pain that is then difficult to iterate in the future. So it's about trying to simplify that whole process.   MH: You definitely strike me as a very people-focused worker and person generally, which is really lovely. I don't think from the outset on face value you'd think software developer as a people focused person. Rightly or wrongly?   TML: It's critical. I mean everybody works in teams. We have to work together. You know, you've got that stereotype, but it's important that our people, are happy and engaged. You absolutely need that to have the most effective way of developing software and get the most out of it.   MH: Well, thank you so much that brings us to a nice end. Have you enjoyed?   TML: Yeah, it's been really good.   MH: So thank you everyone for listening to this podcast. In case you missed the last episode of our Meet the Team series, we spoke with Oceanne last month about her role as an Interaction Designer. You can find all of our podcasts on Soundcloud or wherever you listen to your podcast. Thank you again. Bye.  

On this week's Civil Service World Podcast, Suzannah Brecknell and Jess Bowie are discussing kindness in the civil service. They're joined for the discussion by former civil servant and founder of One Team Gov, and also, down the line from Scotland, by Sarah Davison, CEO of the Carnegie UK Trust, and Dr Elizabeth Kelly, a GP. Hosted by Jess Bowie and Suzannah Brecknell. With Kit Collingwood. And Sarah Davidson and Elizabeth Kelly. Produced and edited by Nick Hilton for Podot. Additional recording by Alexis Adimora. Visit www.civilserviceworld.com/ for more!

We chat to Areeq Chowdhury, founder of WebRoots Democracy and Head of Think Tank for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at Future Advocacy. Beginning his career in U.K. government and Parliament, we hear what inspired Areeq to found his think tank WebRoots Democracy at the age of 21. Areeq shares his expertise on the topic of online voting, and argues for the urgency of engaging the modern generation of voters in political participation.We discuss the role of technology, social media, and artificial intelligence in shaping recent elections, and how the balance of power is shifted towards the individual by providing independent and secret means to vote. Areeq also highlights the role of accessibility in providing fair and inclusive access to democracy. Finally, we get Areeq’s thoughts on what he would change about U.K. parliament, and add AOC to our official OneTeamGov drinking game. MLF, you’ve got company!

We chat to Cate McLaurin, Head of Delivery at Hackney Council in London, U.K, about her role bringing public sector reformists together to deliver public services with users at the heart.Beginning her career in marketing and communications, we explore why those skillsets are so valuable and translatable into user-led service delivery roles. Cate talks about her 14 years as a job-share, and we discuss how everyone can benefit from more flexible ways of working.Leading the OneTeamGov within local government in the U.K, we hear about Cate's experiences leading a large ICT department and the evolution towards agile ways of working. Cate shares the challenges of growing a digital team in such a competitive market, and explains how Hackney are developing the next wave of talent through their apprenticeships team.Finally, we chat about all things governance, and get excited for Cate hosting the first ever OneTeamGov bureaucracy hack on the 3rd of July! Check out our website for more details on how you can get involved:

In this episode, we talk to former DWP Deputy Director and OneTeamGov co-founder Kit Collingwood about her time in government.  A full transcript of the episode follows: Angus Montgomery:Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, my name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and I’m very pleased to be joined today by Kit Collingwood, currently at DWP but recently announced soon to be leaving and getting an exciting new job in agency-world, so we’ll be talking to Kit about her time in government and looking back over some of the things that she’s done, so thankyou for joining us Kit Kit Collingwood:Thanks for having me. Angus Montgomery:So Kit, just to kick things off could you tell me a little bit about your role at DWP, your current role, and some of the things that you do there? Kit Collingwood:Sure. So my role is head of data transformation for the Department for Work and Pensions, so what my teams do is we work in the intersection between data, digital and technology to improve services and improve decision-making. Angus Montgomery:And how did you end up there? What’s your career path been so far? Because you’ve been around- well, I think it’s fair to say you’re a well-known figure in digital government. You’ve been around digital government for a while. What’s that journey entailed? Kit Collingwood:Well, it’s a huge cosmic accident actually. I worked actually in the engineering sector for five years after I graduated. I was a proof-reader and a translator for five years and then I decided that I wanted to be in the public service in some capacity. So I in 2009 joined the civil service fast-stream. I was a policy maker for three years working on different areas of justice policy, and I worked in parliament for a while putting a bill through parliament. When I came from the end of that experience, I almost left the civil service because the ways that I thought that policy making and parliamentary work were happening were so antiquated and so out of touch with the average person’s experience that I’d really sort of lost faith with a lot of government ways of working and I was really saddened by a lot of what I’d seen. There was really no empathy or contact with people on the outside of Whitehall and I felt myself really distanced from average human experience. At the same time, I fell into a delivery manager job at a place called the Office of the Public Guardian, which is one of the executive agencies of the Ministry of Justice. I applied for it as a fast-stream role, so it was just one of the regular rotation roles. I didn’t know what a delivery manager was. I didn’t really know how the internet worked, and I knew nothing about agile or about technology. I applied for this role called delivery manager which looked quite fun, and it turned out to be the delivery manager for the lasting power of attorney service, which was one of the first exemplars in the GDS transformation programme. So this was coming towards the end of 2012, which is why I’ve been around for a long time because the beginning of digital government I suppose was around that time in the way that we know it now. GDS was about a year old really. I had an induction that was hilarious in hindsight where my boss sat me down on my first day and she said, “Here’s your induction. I’ve just quit.” So my boss quit on my first day, and she was head of the transformation programme for the Office of Public Guardian. I, being the cheeky youngster that I was, went to her boss and said, “Can I have her job please on a temporary promotion?” And he was foolish enough to give it to me, and that’s how I came into digital government. Angus Montgomery:Oh wow. Kit Collingwood:So I was the accidental head of a transformation programme that I had no idea how to lead, but I did have some ideas about how I thought the place could be better run. So at that point, I was working with a guy called Chris Mitchell from GDS who was one of the very first sort of transformation partners which GDS would place with departments to help them understand how to do digital. He and I got on very well and I also got on very well with Mark O’Neill who was the other person sort of in place at the Ministry of Justice, where OPG was. So they began to teach me the ropes about what this thing called digital was because I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what a software developer did. I had no idea about how all of this works, and really the first six months of that were just me learning and learning and learning. Very quickly I met a few people who would completely transform how I thought about government. Tom Loosemore, Mike Bracken, Richard Pope, Tim Paul and a few others, so I would go to the old buildings in Holborn and that’s how I learned what digital government was, was from those people. They really taught me the basics of why this thing was necessary, what transformation meant, and they inspired me to stay in public service. Angus Montgomery:I’m interested in- because you sort of described in your early career you were becoming frustrated at the lack of human-centeredness or lack of humanness of governments, but you didn’t know what digital meant. So you kind of obviously had a lot of empathy and you understood that government needed to be more user-centred, but at what stage or how did you realise that digital was a way or the way to do this? Or is digital the way to do this? Kit Collingwood:No, I don’t think digital in itself is the way to do it, but it’s one of the tools that we need to be able to do it. So the ability for technology to bring services into people’s homes and everyday lives is part of the way that government should re-approach human connection. I’m fairly convinced about that, but it’s only a subset I think. We, I think, need fundamental retraining in empathy skills, or training not retraining. Fundamental training in empathy skills in order that we can approach the people we serve with compassion. That’s not sort of pure cuddly thinking. There’s a huge economic benefit to understanding end users better, because if you understand the impact of your ideas and your policies on the average person then you can more effectively implement those policies. That to me just stands to reason, so to me high empathy has financial gains for government as well and it frustrates me that people don’t often see that. But to put that aside, to answer your original question, the way that I sort of connected this idea of human connection and digital government was through user research, the kind of doggedness of user research. And quite quickly coming into- I think I inherited a team of sort of two or three people at the OPG and they were bolstered by some GDS folk. I mean, it’s a dream to have somebody like Richard Pope being able to effectively just consult on your ideas with, and that’s kind of an incredible privilege to have had. But there was also this cohort of user researchers, and I didn’t know what one of those was. So just observing them at close quarters, this idea of iterating on your ideas, not doing a massive big bang thing and then just sort of hoping it works, which was- that is the way that government has and had done things. Suddenly there was this cohort of people who would do something small and then test it, see if it worked, and then do something else and then test it to see if it worked.I saw the potential for that outside of technology, so I could see the application of that in policy-making very easily. I could see the application of that even in law-making, which is more controversial, but I can see that. And in fact law-making is iterative actually. It goes through both houses several times, but to me the connection to end users is still lacking, and it’s got huge application for customer service as well, iterating in your ideas. None of the things I’ve just said are remotely original. They all happen now, but at the time it was quite revolutionary. So this idea of getting in a room with people who would be on the receiving end of your stuff, that was huge to me and that really reinvigorated my faith in public service. Angus Montgomery:And can you describe for people who weren’t around, say, back then, it wasn’t that long ago, but in 2012 when the exemplars programme was running, what was the exemplars programme? How did it function and what was the purpose of it? Kit Collingwood:Well, it was 25 high volume services that had a huge potential to be transformational, so it was things- so lasting power of attorney was one and that’s the ability to give somebody the power to act on your behalf if you lose mental health. There were things like carers’ allowance, which is part of my current department, Department for Work and Pensions, and also some less emotive but high volume stuff, so a lot of the DVLA’s digital services, a couple of them fell into that transformation programme as well. So these were high volume services that would show the potential for digital government, and they were acknowledged as being the starting line really. It was to get 25 of them into beta within a certain timescale to show the pace that was potentially there. And for me to begin to develop the skills that government would need to be able to be digital for the future, one of the things which has really dragged, it’s a lot better now, but one of the things that really dragged was this acknowledgement from government that we need this massive cohort of skills to be able to be sustainable in digital beyond something that was a programme, you know, beyond something finite.So I used that exemplar programme to build up a lot of trust and support in what I was doing so I could hire the right kind of people because I could see that this wasn’t going to go away. Angus Montgomery:Yes, yes. How did that actually function day to day, and what was the kind of relationship between- because exemplars is very much run by GDS with these departments. How did that work in practical terms? Was there a sort of mixed GDS/MOJ team? How did that work? Kit Collingwood:Yes, there was initially, yes, and then GDS slowly peeled off. I’m wary that I’m speaking entirely from my own experience. I know that I have an overwhelmingly positive experience of it. Other departments I know felt almost affronted that GDS were coming in and sort of telling them how to do their own services effectively, and I know that there was tension there. Angus Montgomery:Why do you think your experience was positive in that sense? Because GDS was still coming in and kind of telling you or showing you a way of doing something. Why do you think that worked when it might not have worked elsewhere? Kit Collingwood:I never felt that I was being told anything. Maybe it’s because I was so keen to listen, so I felt very humbled by being in this new role, so part of it undoubtedly will be how willing I was to listen to them. I was in a new executive agency, so the OPG was new to me. The Office of the Public Guardian was new, so I was learning the professional domain I was in. I was learning the technical domain and I was learning about digital government so I felt extraordinarily empty-headed. But I’m a really good leader, so I knew I could lead the things. I knew I’d have the right ideas, but I had so much to learn and probably me being so open to learning helped us move that path. If I’d have had slightly more emotional and professional capital invested in what had already gone before, maybe it would have gone less smoothly. That was definitely part of it. The other thing is I recruit curious people, so the team that I brought in to work with me in the OPG were secondees from operational centres, people from policy-making, some external hires. I always promoted a culture of partnership with GDS, so for me they were friends from the beginning. I had no reason not to have that attitude and other people did. Angus Montgomery:Yes. And I suppose the other kind of truism that’s spoken about the exemplars is that they were really, really difficult to work on and that there was burnout and that there were people working incredibly hard but getting incredibly frustrated, and was that something you experienced as well? Kit Collingwood:I didn’t burn out. I found it hugely energising, and again I think my teams were protected by the fact that we did have such a positive relationship. I’m quite keen on sustainable mental health so we never were a team that would work until midnight. We never thought that was cool. We never thought there was anything cool about that, so it never felt very tense in our office. It never- and also you have to embrace a bit of humility in what you’re doing. You’re doing something great and we had a great sense of pride about that, but it’s not brain surgery. Nobody was going to die if we all knocked off at 6:00pm instead of 10:00pm. We took it incredibly seriously but not too seriously, so we never did burnout. We were extraordinarily focused. We basically did one thing for nine months and then we did a second thing for another nine months, so sustainability was always on my mind. And I found very quickly, because I got promoted quite quickly  at that time, I was in danger at the end of my time of OPG of losing visibility of individual products being delivered, so I always had this awareness that you can reach a tipping point where people will start to feel out of focus, and I’d known that from my own experience. So I always tried to have empathy with my teams and make sure that they could work at a pace that suited them. Angus Montgomery:Yes. And they understood- because the other thing about working in that sort of environment is you’re delivering so quickly, you kind of need to- I don’t know. This is just me positing, I suppose. You kind of need to step back and look at what you’ve achieved as well and if you’re delivering really quickly that can be quite hard to do. Kit Collingwood:Yes, it was a whirlwind. It always felt like a happy whirlwind, and a lot of the- we had like the lowest turnover of the whole place, you know, really high engagement, and there were people still working in that digital team that have been there now for five or six years, so it was a good place to be, but the pace was high. I remember a year in we looked back at what we’d done and we’d done one service from scratch to public beta, an additional service from scratch into alpha. We’d done the first digital strategy. We’d quadrupled the team size. We’d redrawn how we did recruitment. We’d changed the pay scales. We’d redone our commercial contract so that we were outside of big IT contracts, and what else had we done? There was something else as well. Oh, we’d redesigned the governance as well so we could do our governance. And we’d sort of looked back after a year and we were like, “Holy.” We did a lot, and a lot of it was- there was a real lack of self-importance to that team. We knew we were doing good stuff, but when we wrote our strategy it was like eight pages so we did it in about three weeks, so there was a real lack of fanfare in a good way. You know, it was just heads down and crack on and try not to show off too much. Angus Montgomery: It’s interesting you say that because that’s one of the things, because I joined GDS in 2016 because I’d been a journalist before so I’d been a sort of observer of digital government and one of the things that really struck me about what GDS and what people working in digital were doing was that they were delivering stuff. GDS in particular was really vocal about the work that it was doing, but it was showing the work. It wasn’t talking about abstract things or concepts or strategies. It was like, “Here’s a thing that we’ve done. Here’s how it works,” and that was really inspiring as someone outside this. Kit Collingwood:The phrase of strategy as delivery is banded around by everybody now, and it’s almost had its hay-day. People have almost stopped saying it in some circles, but I can’t describe how powerful that was to somebody like me who’d come out of the most bureaucratic part of Whitehall, you know, the middle of a policy team, a kind of strategic policy team, and I’d come out of- I’d worked for all three main political parties by that point, so I’d joined the government in 2009 and I’d worked for the coalition government which I was working for at that time. So working with a lot of different ministers doing things like ministerial handover, loads of briefings, lots of policy documents, lots of consultation, very slow, sluggish pace. Great work being done but sluggish, and suddenly this idea that we could be released from writing constant documents to prove the worth of what we were doing was just ridiculously revolutionary, and I can’t  exactly describe why. It’s so obvious that you could get on with the work rather than spend a million years doing a 100-page business case, but to me that was like, “Oh, Christ, I can do this so differently.” And that’s why our strategy took three weeks and it was eight pages, and our business case was like ten pages. The hidden bit about that was a lot of me putting my neck on the line saying, “No, no, no, I’m going to write this short. It’s going to be really short, really simple,” trying to simplify everything, and that’s where the effort went. It’s a funny analogy actually because it’s the same way that the design plans went as well. Government websites are massively overdesigned. Then GDS comes out with something that’s basically a white page with a green button in the middle with a bit of highlighting on it and everyone is like, “Oh. That’s how we’re going to design things now,” and they were like, “Yes, yes. We just basically don’t put much on the page.” Everyone is like, “Oh, right,” and it’s a really analogous approach to what I took to everything after, business cases, documentation, recruitment processes, governance. Everything went the same way. You don’t need to clutter it with all of that noise. Angus Montgomery: Yes. It’s just so incredibly powerful because you were in government while this was happening, but I was reporting on the private sector and the private sector organisations weren’t doing this. It took an organisation within government or a group of people within government to drive this kind of simplicity home. And working in government now and understanding the complexities of it, it’s just unbelievable almost that that happened. Kit Collingwood:Yes, and of course it peed people off. Of course it did. Everybody who had ever built one of those websites would be peed off because that’s your work being rubbished by these people, all of whom were pretty young. They were highly paid because they’d come from the private sector. They were off, siphoned off from Whitehall. They were other, and they were consistent. GDS were consistently othered by a lot of big government departments, and still are frankly. I don’t think you can be a rebel of that magnitude without peeing off a hell a lot of people. What I took as my task was to try and- I’d been in a policy-making community that thought that digital government were a load of jeans-wearing hipsters. Now I was in a digital community that thought that policy-makers were a load of 50-year-old white fuddy-duddies, and elements of both of those things are true. You know, there are jeans wearing hipsters in digital government and there are white middle-aged fuddy-duddies in policy making but that doesn’t mean that we’re not trying to do the right thing. So from that point, my mission was just trying  to connect people so that- you can’t do anything without trust so it’s just trying to increase the level of trust between the different communities that I was operating in. Angus Montgomery: Yes. And how did you- because I guess we’ve talked a lot about the exemplars and the rapid pace of what was happening, the rapid pace of change, and touched on things like the controversies around that. But you’ve been in government for a long time and carried on that work, and how did you make it sustainable? How did you take that kind of environment and that thinking and sustain it into another department, into another role, into new teams? Kit Collingwood:I think it was a series of steps really. There were some mechanistic steps such as I began quite early to realise that government funding isn’t set up for digital. It is a bit better now, but at that point you did project works. You’re funded for a blob of thing and when the thing ended you weren’t funded for the thing anymore. Well, that was never going to work with things like CICD, so the continuous delivery of technology doesn’t work with that funding model. I blessedly realised that quite early and I started to work very closely with finance and commercial business partners to smooth out that path so that things like- this is so boring, but this was what got it done. CapEx versus OpEx was well-known and well chartered, so I didn’t want to have a drop in the team that was sharp between this thing called build and this thing called run. For me that’s still a false divide. Well, anybody who works in a DevOps way, that’s a false divide. So I plotted with them to go from a full team size- say your team size is 10. Over time I would look to retain 4 of that team and I would build that into a bigger business case and I’d have like a slide down from one to the other. And putting in the groundwork with those people who are naturally mistrusting of something where it looks like you’re trying to game an existing process and just getting them to see what I was doing and these services- if you run these services while in perpetuity, you don’t have to then have this change request of £1m a year down the line. Angus Montgomery:Yes, that comes in, yes, yes. Kit Collingwood:Because you’re continuously enhancing what you’re doing, but you can enhance it with a smaller team and it wasn’t always cheaper actually or it didn’t always look cheaper, but I knew that you’d then five years down the line wouldn’t have to buy the thing again because you’d have built it in-house. So it was a lot of donkey work of redrawing everything about how we do finance and commercial work and commercial partnering and governance and all that kind of stuff, so that was part of it. Part of it was government catching up, so digital became not weird while I was a couple of years in, call it 2014, digital government was then effectively becoming sustainable in its own right. I had to fight a lot less hard to get the basics that I wanted to get done done. In the early days I had to have Mike Bracken come and advocate for the things I wanted to get done. It was that ridiculous. I didn’t need that by 2014, and at that point I moved to Ministry of Justice digital, the central digital team, and that had people like Dave Rogers in it who’s still there. He was great, and you kind of move from sensible support people to sensible support people. Angus Montgomery:Yes. How do you kind of- well, it might sound a stupid question, but how do you identify and how do you end up working with people like that? How do you find allies? Kit Collingwood:How do I find allies? Angus Montgomery:Because I do get the sense there’s kind of a network of people in different departments now, and the names are probably well known of people who are doing good things who- Kit Collingwood:Yes. How did we all find each other? Sort of thing. Angus Montgomery:How did you all find each other? Yes. Kit Collingwood:I think we were all curious. So this community of- they’re well known on digital government Twitter. That community of people. You know, there’s probably a couple of hundred of us who’ve been around for- call it five years or more. Dave Rogers is one of them. All of the original GDSs are in there as well, although many of us have gone our separate ways. For the ones who weren’t the real inception, so the Mikes and Toms, I think curiosity was a big bit of it. A lot of us found each other from being mutually introduced by well-networked people, so people like Tom would introduce us sometimes. Emer Coleman was another one for doing that. Kathy Settle. There were these people who knew people and they’d say, “Oh, so and so,” and then people would make some kind of connection between us and we’d almost invariably get on, so that was part of it. Those of us who came out of Whitehall as opposed to being external hires found a natural empathy with each other because we’d been so frustrated by where we’d been and we were generally known as being pains in the bum basically where we are and we were quite grateful- I always think if you, in any meeting room, say you’ve got 12 people in a meeting room, you’re the one that feels really outré and the radical one. You’re just in the wrong room, and suddenly you’re in the right room and it’s just this huge comfort. Angus Montgomery:Yes, that was going to be my next question is kind of, what are you looking for in these people? Because it sounds like a mix of sort of bravery in a sense of they’re willing to take a risk with something. They’ve got convictions, but also they have empathy. Kit Collingwood:Yes. Well, I probably can’t swear in this podcast, can I? Angus Montgomery:I think you maybe could. Kit Collingwood:I’ll put it the opposite way. I only work with lovely people, that’s my rule, so three is something about being kind and warm that is at the core of the kind of person I would look to work with. But there’s something about- the way I put it is we want to reform the machine without breaking it, so all of those people are massively inpatient with the way the government works, massively frustrated, want to beat their heads against the wall but basically love the place, and if they leave they’ll always come back. They are either civil servants through and through in their DNA or you know that you’ll see them again in some point in the future, and it’s those people who care deeply about public service, it gives them that lovely balance of wanting to do the right thing by end users but without completely breaking the machine that they’re working in, and it’s a really hard balance to strike. But when you find it, it’s like gold dust. They’re the best people. Angus Montgomery:Right, okay. And the other thing I wanted to talk to you about was One Team Gov as well because you were one of the- were you one of the founders of One Team Gov? Is that right? Kit Collingwood:I was. Angus Montgomery:Yes. Well, first of tell me why it was set up and what the purpose if it is. Kit Collingwood:One Team Gov was born out of my frustration at the lack of empathy between government professions, so it’s the ultimate realisation of my experience leaving policy-making and going into digital government really. And having observed and then worked in such a tribal system where if you weren’t us, you were them and you weren’t to be trusted. Well, id’ belonged to two tribes and I was like,  “Well, where’s the ‘us’ in the middle of all this ‘them’ then if everybody is ‘them’?” So I spoke at a conference in March 2017 about- I gave a talk about data as it happens. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and I was advised to go and see a guy speak after me called James Reeve who works at the Department for Education. I’d been told he was a great speaker and I listened to him and I spoke to him afterwards and we got on really well, and he was also coming out of policy making and going into a digital role, so the same thing that I’d done, what, five years previously he was now doing. We talked about the experience of how policy-makers don’t get on with digital people in mutual mistrust, and we’d said we’d both been to professional events. We’d been to policy-making events and digital events, but there was no rebel event just for- where are all your generic rebels regardless of background? Where is anybody welcome? Angus Montgomery:This is how you find each other, was it? Kit Collingwood:Yes, exactly. And the tagline we often use for One Team Gov is if you’re tired of waiting for the revolution, start one yourself, not that we aim to start a revolution. That’s really self-important, but we did want to have an event where you would be welcomed as a reformer regardless of your background. You didn’t have to be some whizzy fast-streamer. You didn’t have to be anything really, and we just had a single event. As we were coming up to the event we realised that we wanted to make it a community, so we, classic bit of partnership, Joe Lanman who works here as a designer designed us some branding and we built a little website and we got some regular meet-ups in which are still going now 18 months down the line. All we aimed to do was just to give a safe space to rebels, that’s all. So those people who don’t want to trash the machine but want to make it better, we just wanted to be the people that they could go to, and that was it. It was and is super simple really. [00:35:30] It’s based mainly on networks, on connections and on honest conversations with people. But the heartbeat of it is our meet-ups that we have in London, Cardiff, in the north, Scotland, Stockholm, Ottawa. Angus Montgomery:Internationally now. Kit Collingwood:Yes. So it spreads internationally through those same networks of those positive rebels, and, yes, I’m really proud of it. It gives such a safe space to those people who are just sitting in the wrong meeting room being that single person. They just need to find the right meeting room and we’ve given them that. Angus Montgomery:Yes. One of the things that strikes me having talked about your time working in digital government is you’ve gone from, and this is kind of, I suppose, illustrative of digital government as a whole. You’ve gone from working on an exemplar, so a single service or a single digital touchpoint, to working in an area where you’re bringing together people from across different professions to look at kind of the much wider picture, and that to me kind of illustrates the broadening of digital government, how we think about it from kind of these single touch points to suddenly these whole services or these whole kind of policies. Is that kind of how you see your career having developed? Do you think it has kind of gone like that? Kit Collingwood:Yes. Yes, I think it has. It started off as a blob. We were almost a carbuncle in the beginning and seen by some as a carbuncle as well, and the world to make digital governments sustainable- well, you know, they say that it’ll be sustainable when we stop saying digital, but we’re not there yet. And to my mind, you’ll still need specialist technologists in government so you’ll always have a thing called a technology team or a digital team or something, so it’s not quite the ambition to never say digital ever again but it should evolve in meaning, I think, to encompass not just technologists but people who are interested in internet-enabled reform, which is kind of how I would characterise it. So, yes, it’s definitely evolved from being something where you’re a heavily specialist team relatively separated from the rest of the organisation to something where every profession is welcome. One of the things that- I get a bit [00:40:26] twitchy talking about things that I’ve done that I’m proud of because I get self-conscious, but there are a few and of them there’s somebody called Kaz Hufton who was- she worked for the Office of Public Guardian and she worked in our call centre. She’s one of our operational people and we found her and she was an exceptionally good and is an exceptionally good product manager. We found her in operations, and she proved very quickly that she was going to be better at this job than anybody else we could find and we made her a product manager, and I had to propose and then stand behind that decision. She needed to be promoted about three times because the grade difference between operations and digital was quite tricky at that point, but we did that and it proved something. It proved that if you’re this thing called operations, you don’t have to stay there forever just as I hadn’t in policy. You can transition your career actually, and people come into digital and learn how to do product development. You don’t need a million years to learn how to do it. You need a lot of smarts, a lot of empathy, very open ears, and then professional skills that you learn down the line. I was so glad that we gave her that break, and that’s something that I’ve done consistently ever since is not assume that if somebody is a policy-maker that they can never be a digital person or vice versa. It’s the same reason I started One Team Gov is it’s kind of this you don’t have to stay in that tribe actually. You can go and work across, and I suppose where I am now working in data is a natural extension of that because to my mind, there needs to be a data leap for government in the same way that there was a digital leap for government from 2011 onwards. Data people are still a little bit off in a silo in a corner being nerds. They’re even siphoned off from product teams, so one of the missions that I’ve had in DWP is to work intersectionally between digital data and technology so that we blur those professional boundaries. Somebody like a data scientist is a classic- you know, if you call them sort of a coder analyst, they’re already a technologist and a data professional, so why do they have to sit over in that corner? Why can’t they come and be in this product team? And embedding data scientists into product teams has been one of the things that we’ve done in DWP to absolutely great effect. So again it’s trying to fight the good fight every day for people, dropping their assumptions about what somebody can and can’t do. Angus Montgomery:Yes, yes, yes. And just before we finish off, I’d like to ask you, I suppose potentially at the risk of making you feel uncomfortable, a couple of questions about you and how you operate, I suppose. You said earlier in this conversation that when you’re taking about going on the exemplar you didn’t know much about digital but you knew how to lead, and you are one of the people in this world who’s seen, I suppose, as a role model, as a leader. What sort of behaviours do you hope that you’re showing, that you hope that people kind of pick up? What do you hope that you’re role modelling that people will pick up from you? Kit Collingwood:I’m kind to people. Angus Montgomery:That’s the best behaviour. Kit Collingwood:You can never have too much kindness in the world, I think, and I think I’m pretty consistently kind. I will say that about myself. I’m very willing to re-examine what is a yes and what’s a no because I’m very dogged in the pursuit of what I believe to be right, and I think that’s a good role model for the bit of government I’m in because you have to be fairly persistent to get things done and I’ve never taken a no to be a final no. I’ve always been able to chase down what I believe to be the right answer. I don’t know if that’s- maybe I’m ideological, but I’ve always tried to fight for the right thing. I hope that I am seen as being passionate about diversion and inclusion because I am. Although I’m a woman in technology and a gay woman in technology and a gay woman parent in technology, my interests do go beyond that and I would hope that I have given other people space to progress where they thought they might not have that space. So inclusiveness with age, grade boundary, professional boundary, colour, disability, I hope that I’m not deluding myself, that that is something I’m known for. And as I said, I do try and give my time to try and make the place a bit better, so things like One Team Gov and mentoring people, that kind of thing. If I were to leave an impression of myself, I hope that that would be in it. Angus Montgomery:And who do you look to as a role model or who inspires you at the moment? Either within this world or outside it, I suppose. Kit Collingwood:Am I allowed a few? Angus Montgomery:Of course. Just like a dinner party thing. Kit Collingwood:My girlfriend would have to go on that list. One of the most amazing product people I’ve ever observed and the kindest person. Angus Montgomery:Just for the sake- who’s your girlfriend? Kit Collingwood:Kylie Havelock. Angus Montgomery:Kylie Havelock. Kit Collingwood:Yes. Yes, she’s taught me a lot about kindness and about diversion and inclusion as well and a million other things. My kids inspire me all the time. They’re not constrained by what anybody expects of them, and I love that about them. I try and learn from them and try and- they’ve made me challenge a lot of my assumptions about myself and about the world. And then professionally, I’d always say Lara Sampson who works at the DWP who is the most consummately brilliant civil servant I have ever worked with and has remained that to this day. She wins the prize. She is incredible and inspirational. I would always say Tom Loosemore as well who’s effectively very quietly, without anybody knowing it, mentored me for about six years without ever asking for anything in return and has quietly been responsible for several of my career moves without ever taking credit for it or asking for anything back. So given that this will be public, I’ll say publically thank you to him. He’s done a lot for me without anybody ever knowing that, so I’ll always be grateful. Angus Montgomery:And just finally, if there’s one piece of advice you could give to someone, so say there’s someone in your situation now going back, what was it, six years ago, kind of in a role. You were in a policy role were you were kind of thinking, “This isn’t really what I’m interested in. This isn’t giving me the empathy, the satisfaction that I want.” What advice would you give to that person that you've learned over the last seven or eight years? Kit Collingwood:Wow. I’d say find a hero. It’s always good to have somebody to look up to think, you know, what would so-and-so do in this situation? I think it’s always good to see a perspective that isn’t your own. I’d say a good dose of sort of mindfulness for want of a better word, so realising where you are on the frustration versus action scale. There can be a feeling amongst some civil servants in particular that they’re so frustrated the only thing they can do is leave, and I’ve seen many people go their way and it’s not a bad thing to do at all. It’s the only thing to do for a lot of people, but there’s this tipping point and if you’re on this tipping point of, “Oh my God, I want the world to be better but I want to stay and make it better,” I’d always say contact One Team Gov because you’ll find some likeminded people as well. But I’d also say to them, if any of those people are listening, you’re not alone. So many civil servants are frustrated. The civil service is frustrating. It will always be, but it’s the best place in the world, my belief is, and if you’re on that tipping point where you’re incredibly frustrated but believe you can do something better, it’s not just you. And again if you’re that one person in a room of 12 who’s just in the wrong room, go and find a different room and you can start to feel more normal, and there are so many lateral moves you can make to get that done and you might just start to be reinvigorated like I was. Angus Montgomery:And those rebels are easier to find now. Kit Collingwood:Very easy to find now. Yes, so Clare Moriarty is one of them and she’s got one of the toughest jobs going in government at the moment. Jeremy Heywood was one as well. He was one of the people who gave me advice, again when he didn’t have to. A very tough time for him that showed me that truly he was on the side of the revolutionaries. He wanted to see reform as well, so you can move up the pay scale and up the ladder and be a rebel as well. You can do that. Angus Montgomery:Yes. Kit Collingwood, thank you very much for joining us. Kit Collingwood:Thank you for your time. Angus Montgomery:Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us for that episode of the GDS podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to listen to any more of what we’re doing, then please go to wherever it is that you listen to or download your podcasts and subscribe to the GDS podcast because we’ve got lots more exciting stuff coming up this year, so we hope you’ll join us again soon. Thank you very much.

Welcome back to the OneTeamGov show for 2019! We're back in Canada chatting to Jacquelyn Cardinal, co-founder of Naheyawin; a strategic digital agency that uses research, systems thinking, and storytelling to find connection to the people and things that matter most. Jacquelyn shares her early experiences growing up as part of an indigenous community in Edmonton, and how she came to be so passionate about harnessing technology to tackle difficult societal problems. We talk about how the age of information has influenced indigenous rights and offered new opportunities to forge human connection in society as a whole.We also chat about radical optimism, mental health as an enabler for empathy, and the value of learning from failure. And finally, we get Jacqui's top tip for podcast enthusiasts - what better way to kick off the New Year!

Transcript of the interview:https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2018-11-09-interview-with-oneteamgov-podcastOur final show for 2018 is an extra special one! We chat with Audrey Tang, Minister for Digital in the Taiwanese Government. An opensource entrepreneur and former political activist, Audrey is now leading Taiwan's efforts to become the most inclusive digital economy in the world. Audrey shares her early experiences in the opensource community, founding several tech startups, and explains how the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan helped to bring about radical change in the country's democracy. We chat about the value of radical transparency and collaborative government in government, and hear incredible examples of this in practice.We also discuss Audrey's responsibility for broadband access in ensuring a participatory and inclusive society, and how indigenous communities are enriching the nation's worldview. Finally, we get Audrey's top tips on dealing with internet trolls! A fitting end to a fantastic year with the OneTeamGov community.

In this episode, we talk to Terence Eden, Open Standards Lead at the Government Digital Service. We discuss his job, a digitally-equipped civil service and emerging technology in government. The full transcript of the interview follows: Sarah Stewart: Hello. Welcome to the second GDS podcast. I’m Sarah Stewart, Senior Writer at the Government Digital Service. Today I’ll be joined in conversational paradise with Terence Eden. Terence is known variously as a tech enthusiast, as a digital troublemaker, as the man who hacked his own vacuum cleaner to play the ‘Star Wars’ theme tune, but in a professional capacity he is the Open Standards Lead at the Government Digital Service. Terence, welcome. Terence Eden:  Thank you very much for having me. Sarah Stewart:  So how do you explain what you do? Terence Eden:  What I tend to say, in a very reduced vocabulary, is, “We have computers. Government has computers, and those computers need to talk to each other, but sometimes those computers don’t speak the same language.” It’s my job to say, “Hey, can we agree on a common language here?” Then, when we can, those computers speak to each other. It’s, kind of, as simple as that. If we publish a document and it’s in a format that you don’t understand, that’s a barrier to entry for you. You can’t get access to the data or the information you need. If we publish it in such a way that it’s only available on one manufacturer’s type of smartphone, that’s a barrier. We can’t do that, so it’s my job to say, “No, let’s make it available to everyone, in a common language.” I’ve got a big sticker on my laptop which says, ‘Make things open. It makes things better.’ That applies to a whole variety of things, and there are people here working on open data, and open source, and open government, but my part of the mission is to say that, when government produces documents or data, everyone should be able to read them. It’s unacceptable that we say, “Okay, if you want to interact with government, you need to pay this company this money, for this software, which only works on that platform.” That’s completely antithetical to everything we’re trying to do, so my mission – our team’s mission – is to go around government, saying, “There’s a better way of doing things, there’s a more open way of doing things, and we can help you with that.”  Sarah Stewart: That sounds completely straightforward. Terence Eden: You’d think, wouldn’t you? Most of the time it is. When you tell people and you say, “If you publish it like this, then only people with that computer can read it,” it’s like a light goes off. Sarah Stewart:  Do you go out to departments proactively, or do they come to you? Terence Eden: It’s both. I spent last week talking to the DWP and the Government Statistical Service, and I’m speaking, I think, this week to a couple of different departments and ministries. We go out, we chat to them, but quite often they come to us and say, “Hey, users have complained about this,” or, “Hang on. We think we need to do something better. What should we do?” and we offer just a wide range of advice. Sarah Stewart: Government is huge and technology changes all the time so how do you make sure you are progressing in the right direction, that you’re achieving what needs to be achieved, and that your work is ‘done’, I mean is it even possible to say your work is ‘done’? Terence Eden: Wow… It’s a slight Sisyphean task, I think, because there’s always going to be a new department coming online which doesn’t get it, or someone who’s come in, and a bit of work which only gets published every five years, and the process is never updated. It’s a rolling task. We monitor everything the government publishes. My team, when we see a department which only publishes something in a proprietary format, we drop them an email and say, “Hey, look, here are the rules. This is what you need to do. Can you fix it?” Most of the time they do, and we’ve seen… We’ve published some statistics. We’re seeing a steady rise in the number of open-format documents which are being published. That’s great, so we’re on our way with the mission. You can’t expect everyone to keep on top of every change in technology and the best practice all the time, so there is always going to be a need for bits of GDS to go out and say, “You know what? This is best practice. This is the right way to do it, and we can help you get there and make things more open.” So… we need to do, I think, in GDS and across government, a better job of understanding what our users want – what they need, I should say – and also explaining that user need back to the rest of government. Sarah Stewart: But what’s your focus at the moment? Terence Eden: We have a problem with PDFs. I don’t think that’s any surprise. I’ve published the stats, but there are some critical government forms which are being downloaded millions of times per year, which could be better served being online forms. When someone has to download, print out a form, fill it in by hand and then post it back, for someone else to open it up, scan it, or type it in, we- Sarah Stewart:  It’s the worst. Terence Eden: It’s the worst. It’s rubbish. It’s a rubbish user experience. It’s expensive and it’s not very efficient. It means you’re waiting weeks to get an answer, whereas if you can just go on your phone and type in your name, address, and all the other bits that they want, and hit ‘go’ and then get either an instant or a rapid decision, that just transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, as we say. So, a large part of the next six months is going to be finding those… It’s not low-hanging fruit, but it’s just those big, horrible things which just no-one has got round to tackling yet. Some of them, there are good reasons and there are whole business processes behind, but we need to be pushing and saying, “Look, in 2018 this isn’t good enough. This isn’t the way that we can behave anymore.” A lot of what I do is going round to departments, and doing presentations, and talking to people individually and in groups. I see that continuing. We also work a lot with SDOs: standard development organisations. I’m on a committee for the British Standards Institute, and I work with World Wide Web Consortium, and so we’re making sure that the government’s view is represented. We don’t ever want to produce a standard which is a government standard, and it’s the government’s own standard. It’s the only one, and we’re the only people who use it, because no-one wants to deal with that. We want to have… We want to be using internationally accepted standards. If you’re an SME, if you’re a small-medium business and you want to pitch for some work for government, you don’t need to go and buy a huge, expensive standard, or you don’t need to do a piece of work just for us. Your work can be applicable everywhere. That said, it’s important for us to be on these standards development organisations so we can say, “Actually, our user needs are going to be slightly different from a FTSE 100 company, or from a charity, or from someone else.” We can just shape those standards so that they’re slightly more applicable for us. Sarah Stewart: Someone listening might ask: why can’t government use, say, something like Google Forms instead of a PDF? Why can’t government just do this? Terence Eden: In some ways, they can. With that particular example, we need to understand people’s concerns about privacy. If we were using a third-party form supplier, for example, do you want, if you’re filling in a form which says how many kids you’ve got, how many have died, and your health issues and all that, do you want that going to a third party to be processed? Some people will be comfortable with it. Some people will, rightly, be uncomfortable with it. We need to make sure that any solution that we pick actually addresses users’ very real concerns. There are several pieces of work around government trying to get forms right. Part of the problem is that each department has their own set of users, with their own set of user needs. If you are a, I don’t know… If you’re a farmer applying for a farm payment, you have very different needs to if you are a single mother applying for child benefit, to if you are a professional accountant trying to submit something to HMRC. So, just saying, “We’re going to have one standardised way of sending data to the government” might actually not work. We have to realise that users all have different needs. It’s tricky, and there are ways that we are helping with it, but I think that’s going to be a piece of work which is going to continue rumbling on, just because some of these processes are very old-fashioned, and they still rely on things being faxed across and being handwritten. Sarah Stewart: Faxed? That can’t be right. Actually, no, I can believe it Terence Eden: Lots of stuff just goes through via fax because, if you’ve got a computer system built in one department, and a computer system built by someone else in another department, and they don’t speak the same language, actually the easiest way to do something is to send a photo of that document across. That’s easiest and quickest. Fax is relatively quick, but it comes with all of this baggage and it doesn’t always work right. We see that fax machines are vulnerable to computer viruses and stuff like this. Sarah Stewart: And the noise. Terence Eden:   And the noise, but sometimes we have these little stopgaps, which are good enough for the time, but they never get replaced. Part of the work that we’ve done with the Open Standards Board is to make sure that all emergency services use a standard called ‘MAIT’ – Multi Agency Incident Transfer – which basically means you don’t need a police department to fax across details to an ambulance or to a coastguard. Their computers, even if they’re made by different people and run different operating systems and programs, they all speak to a common standard. So trying to find where those little bugs in the process are is part of our job. If people want to help out, if they know where problems are, if they come across to GitHub, we’re on ‘github.com/alphagov/open-standards’. They can raise an issue there and say, “Hey, there really ought to be an open standard for,” dot, dot, dot, or, “Look, this process really doesn’t make sense. There’s this open standard which would save us a lot of time and money. Can we adopt it?” It’s as simple as raising a GitHub issue with us. We do most of the hard work to find out whether it’s suitable, and we take it through a slightly convoluted process, but it keeps us legally in the clear. Yes, then we can, hopefully, mandate that across government and start the work on getting people to adopt it. Some of the stuff we do is small. Saying that text should be encoded using Unicode UTF-8, that just basically means that, when someone sends you a document with an apostrophe in it, it doesn’t turn into one of those weird… We call it ‘Mojibake’, where there are just weird symbols in place of- Sarah Stewart: The squares. Terence Eden: Yes, the weird squares. That is a really boring, low-level standard, but it just makes everything easy, all the way up to something like MAIT or International Aid Transparency Initiative, which allows you to see where all the foreign aid that we spend, and all the grants that we make, goes. That’s hugely important for understanding, if you’re a taxpayer, where your money is going, but, if you’re in the charity sector or the aid sector, understanding how government is using funds to improve lives. We don’t want information to be locked away in filing cupboards. We don’t want it so that, if you request some information, you have to send an FOI and then you get a scan of a fax posted off to you. That’s rubbish. We want this information front and centre so that, if people want to use it, it’s there, and that it works absolutely everywhere. It doesn’t matter which phone you’ve got, which computer you’ve got, you should be able to access all of the information that you’re entitled to, with no intermediaries, no having to pay for extra software. It should just be there. If we make things open, then we make things better. Sarah Stewart: Another area of focus for you is emerging technology - innovation is a hot topic in government at the moment with the publication of the tech innovation in government survey, the GovTech catalyst fund, and the development of an innovation strategy. How do we make sure that government doesn’t just grab at new fashionable tech because it’s new and fashionable? Terence Eden: The author William Gibson has a beautiful quote, which is, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed yet.” That’s not really the case. The future isn’t here. We’ve got glimpses that, if we can build this huge dataset, then we will be able to artificial intelligence the blockchain into the cloud and magic will happen. You’re right: people just go a little starry-eyed over this. What we need in government is people who understand technology at a deep and fundamental level, not people who see what a slick sales team is selling, not people who read a report in a newspaper and go, “We could do that.” You need a fundamental understanding. Sarah Stewart: Do you really think it’s possible that every Civil Servant can understand the fundamentals of emerging technology and digital practice? Terence Eden:  Yes. Sarah Stewart: Because it can seem quite frightening. Terence Eden:  Yes, absolutely. We wouldn’t accept a civil servant who couldn’t read or write. We can be as inclusive as we like, but we need to set minimum standards for being able to engage with the work that we do. Similarly, we wouldn’t accept a civil servant who couldn’t type or use a computer in a basic way. I think there’s a lot of nonsense talked about digital natives. What a digital native is: someone whose parents were rich enough to buy them a computer when they were a kid. That’s great, but not everyone is that lucky, but what we can do is say, “We’re not going to just train you in how to fill in a spreadsheet. We’re going to teach you to think about how you would build a formula in a spreadsheet, how to build an algorithm,” and you can start building up on that. We have to be committed to lifelong learning in the civil service. It’s not good enough to say, “Okay, this is your job. You’re going to do it for the next 25 to 40 years, and there will be no change in it whatsoever.” That’s unrealistic. I think as part of that – and it’s not going to happen overnight – we need to make sure that when someone comes in and says, “We’re going to use an algorithm,” that everyone in the room not only understands that but is able to critique it, and potentially be able to write it, as well. I think that’s what the ‘Emerging Technology Development Programme’ is about, is making sure that civil servants can code, making sure that they understand how they would build an AI system, understand what the ethics are, learn about what the reasons for and against using a bit of technology like distributed ledgers are, because otherwise we end up with people just buying stuff which isn’t suitable. We have a slight problem in that we don’t want to tie ourselves to tech which is going to go out of date quickly. It would have been… You can imagine a GDS in the past saying, “Let’s put all of government onto Teletext.” That would be great, but that has a limited shelf life. We’ve got a statement which says that government shouldn’t build apps, because they’re really expensive to use, and they don’t work for everyone. Okay, maybe there are some limited circumstances where we can use them, but by and large we should be providing on neutral technology platforms, like the web. We need to understand exactly what the limitations are when we say, “Bitcoin, blockchain, the cloud, AI,” anything like that. So, there are new technologies, and we do adopt them. We can be slow to adopt them, and part of that is: are we chasing fashion, or are we chasing utility? It’s very easy to confuse the two. We wouldn’t, I think, go for transmitting government documents by Snapchat, for example. How cool would that be? Sarah Stewart: The filters, yes. Terence Eden: Brilliant, but what’s the user need for it? Is it just we want to do something that looks cool? That’s not a user need. Sarah Stewart: Yes. The amount of times I hear people talking about headsets, as though everybody in the country is going to have a VR headset. Terence Eden: Yes, we’re all going to be jacked into the cyber matrix, (Laughter) watching VR stuff. Yes, and maybe VR will take off; maybe we will… In a year’s time, I’ll be the head of VR for GDS. How cool a job title would that be? Sarah Stewart: Well, remember me, or look for me in the matrix. Terence Eden: Yes, but is there a user need for it? For some parts of government, you might say, if you’re doing planning decisions, for example, “Would it be good to strap on a VR headset and take a look around this 3D representation of the town after the remodelling or after the bypass has been built?” whatever it is. Okay, yes, you could make an argument for that. Do people want to interact with government in something like ‘Second Life’, or ‘Minecraft’, or ‘Fortnite’, (Laughter) or any of these things which are just coming out? Maybe. Sarah Stewart:  I’d love to see the customisable characters. Terence Eden: Yes, brilliant. We’ve got to be ever so slightly careful that this cool, shiny tech is going to last, because, if we make an investment in it, that’s other people’s money that we’re spending. When I was in the private sector, it’s shareholders’ money that you’re spending. It’s still someone else’s money that you’re spending, and you have to have a really good business case. It’s alright for us to experiment. Some people in Department for Transport are brilliant at this. Take an idea, run it for a few weeks, and don’t spend more than a few thousand pounds on it, and a few people’s time. Can it work? Does it work? If it doesn’t work, brilliant, we’ve saved money by saying, “Look, doing it this way is probably not going to work for us.” What we don’t want to do is go full in and say, “We’re going to make 3D ‘Angry Birds’ avatars of all civil servants, and then you can play them on your Oculus Rift, or something like that. It’s nonsense. Sarah Stewart: Is sandpit testing something that happens across government, it happens loads in the financial industry, but in government does that exist? Terence Eden: In part it does. One of the big problems that I see is people are afraid of failure. They shouldn’t be. If we were to say, “We are…” It’s very easy to run a procurement exercise and say, “We’re going to choose the best,” but sometimes what’s the necessary thing to do is, “We are going to ask three or four people to build something, to build a prototype in a few weeks, and we expect two of them to fail.” When you say that and you say, “Hang on, we’re going to spend money and we know that it’s going to fail?” Yes, but we don’t know which one is going to fail. We need to try four or five different approaches. Rather than wait until we’ve spent £1m and there’s a public enquiry on it, let’s get the failure out of the way as soon as possible. That’s really scary for people of all levels in the civil service, but it’s absolutely necessary. We need to experiment. We need to take risks – small, self-contained risks where, if it fails, okay, so we’ve spent a bit of money, but not an extortionate amount. We’ve spent a bit of time, but only a few weeks, and what we’ve come up with is: “You know what? Doing it that way, it just won’t work. We’ve experimented, we’ve failed, but that’s going to save us more money in the long term.” It’s a mind-set change, and it’s psychologically difficult to turn to your manager and say, “I want to fail at something, please,” but it’s absolutely necessary. Sarah Stewart: So somewhat related to that is learning and development. I know that you were involved in the pilot ‘Emerging Technology Development Programme’, which was run through the GDS Academy, could you tell more a bit more about that? Terence Eden: So, I’ve already gone on a course to learn ‘R’, which is statistical language. My statistics skills weren’t great, if I’m honest, so being able to learn how to use a really powerful tool like that, and start doing some machine learning on the data that we’re getting in, has been incredibly useful for my job, but I’m also going around talking to other civil servants about things like facial recognition and digital ethics. It’s really easy for us to see, “Wow, we can do something like face recognition. How cool would that be for our department?” but we also need to think about, “What are the problems? What are the dangers? What are the moral, legal, and ethical considerations that we have to do?” We know, for example, that, with a cheap webcam and some open-source code, you can do crude gender recognition, so you can say that “This face looks 90% male,” or, “80% female.” That might be useful in some circumstances, but it’s also particularly scary, and difficult, and troubling if you get it wrong, or if someone doesn’t want their born gender revealed, or anything like that. Where we see bright, shiny, new technology, “We could do something really cool with this,” we also need to temper it and say, “Well, what are the downsides? What are the moral limits to what we can do with this tech?” Sarah Stewart: You mention moral limits, and I would like to talk to you a little more about government and ethics, especially as it relates to emerging technology - what is our responsibility? Terence Eden: I’m not sure – I’m not a politician, obviously – I’m not sure whether it’s our place to say for the private sector, or for individuals, or for open-source projects what to do, but we absolutely have a duty to talk to civil servants about what they are responsible for. We have a civil service code, and it says that all of us have to act impartially, and a whole bunch of other things, but it doesn’t… It talks about acting in an ethical fashion, but it doesn’t necessarily address the code that we create. If you’re working in a big department, and you’ve got a big project and we’re going to create some cool machine-learning thing to look at data, then you should be doing an ethical review on that. The Department for – what are they called, ‘Data and Ethics’? Sarah Stewart: Oh we have the Centre for Data Ethics. Terence Eden: Centre for Data Ethics, yes. If you’ve got a big project that you’re working on, and you’re doing some big data, and you’re trying to learn something from there, then talking to the Centre for Data Ethics is a good thing. You should absolutely be doing it, but, if you’ve just got your laptop one lunchtime, and you’ve downloaded some open-source code from GitHub, and you’re running a machine-learning algorithm on a huge dataset, you can do that by yourself, with no oversight. Should you? What are the ethical considerations that you, as an individual, have to consider? Sarah Stewart: Okay, cast your mind back to July. You were at the National Cyber Security Centre. I was there, too. I saw you with a robot. What was all that about? Terence Eden: The robots are coming for us. There’s no doubt about that, (Laughter) but what we have to understand is, when we say, “The robots are coming for our jobs,” what jobs do we mean? What are the limits of robotics? What can they do? What can’t they do? We built a really simple Lego robot which solves a Rubik’s Cube. You can go online. The instructions are there. The source code is there. It took my wife and I an afternoon to build it, and this solves a Rubik’s Cube faster than nearly everyone in the building. There’s one person in this building who can beat it, so his job is safe. (Laughter) Okay, so government doesn’t sort Rubik’s Cubes, generally. That’s not our job, but we do lots of repetitive work with data which is just rote work. Can we train a robot to do that? How do we deal with edge cases? What are the limits when we start doing robotic process automation? That’s what people need to start thinking about now, is what value do they bring to a job which couldn’t be encoded in an algorithm? I think that’s a challenge for all of us. Sarah Stewart: Just to confirm, the robots are or aren’t coming for our jobs, specifically writers? Terence Eden: Yes. Do you have a spell check on your PC? Sarah Stewart: I do. Terence Eden: There we go. There is a piece of AI which is doing your job. We don’t think of that as AI, but there’s some really sophisticated technology going in to say, ‘Not only have you misspelt that word, because it doesn’t match the dictionary, but, looking at the context, you probably mean this word.’ Sarah Stewart: Yes. That’s already happened. Do you remember the Microsoft paperclip? It looks like you’re writing a letter. Terence Eden: Yes. Sarah Stewart: Actually, I was having a conversation with someone a couple of months ago about speechwriting and how, if you have all of the elements of speechwriting and a computer program, so kind of the rule of three, repetition, a story that includes a beginning, a middle and an end, you actually don’t really need a human to do that. Terence Eden:   Absolutely. Sarah Stewart: Although I probably shouldn’t say that, because I need my job. Terence Eden: I think what we’ll see more is robotic enhancement, if you like, so, as you say, writing a speech, maybe having Clippy coming in and saying, ‘You’re writing a speech. Do you need help with that?” isn’t- Sarah Stewart: Clippy, yes. Terence Eden: Maybe that’s not what you want, but having something which will gently guide you down the right path, making sure that your spelling and grammar is correct, that the structure is correct, that will all be great. Similarly, when you receive a document and your email program has already scanned it and gone, ‘Well, that’s the address, and this is the person who sent it,’ and things like that, you’re just being augmented a bit by a robot, by a bit of artificial intelligence. That’s slowly creeping in. I think lots of email programs now offer buttons at the bottom where you can just read the email and it says, ‘You can either reply, “Yes, that’s great,” or, “No, I need more time to think about it.”’ Realistically, that’s what you want to say, quite a lot of the time. So… Robots are coming for us all now. Sarah Stewart: As long as they don’t come for us in… I’ve seen, like, five films in my entire life, and there’s… Is it ‘I, Robot’, with Will Smith? At first the robots are friendly, and then in the second half I think the robots try to kill… This is like when I try to explain ‘Star Wars’ to you, and you actually know... Terence Eden: We need a podcast of you explaining ‘Star Wars’, because it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Sarah Stewart:  It’s really complex. Let’s talk about the past - you used to sell ringtones - what made you want to work here? Terence Eden: Working in the private sector is great, and working in the public sector is also great. I think people get really hung up about there being a difference, and there isn’t. I’ve worked for some of the biggest companies in the UK, and they have all the same problems that a large government department has. I’ve worked for tiny start-ups, and they can be just as agile as GDS is. There are positives and negatives. I’d spent a long time doing private sector stuff, and it was great fun, but I saw the work that GDS was doing and thought, “I want to be part of that. I want to be pushing the conversation forward. I want to make sure that the government, the civil service in the country where I live, is doing the right thing.” It’s really easy being on the outside, snarking, and I think we’ve all done it. (Laughter) It’s like, even if you’re just snarking about the train company or whoever it is, it’s really easy just to go, “They’re all useless,” nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, but it’s harder to come in and say, “Right, I’m going to try and push from the inside.” I don’t think I’m going to succeed at everything that I want, and I’m not coming in with the attitude that I’m going to revolutionise government. I think it would be dangerous if any one civil servant could do that. (Laughter) Sarah Stewart: I did try. Terence Eden: Did you? But I’ve come in with the attitude that there is a task here that I believe in that I think is important for this country and internationally. If we can lead the way, then we can help influence other people in other countries to do the right thing. That’s fantastic. I’ve met with government representatives from around Europe, from around the world, and they’ve been consistently impressed with what GDS is doing. Some of them are going, “You’ve got some open-source code. We’ll take that, thanks. Wow, these open standards principles that you’ve got, that makes complete sense for us. Yes, we’ll take it. We’ll shuffle it around to meet our local needs, and go off and do it.” That’s brilliant. This job wasn’t my career goal. It just so happened that all the work that I’d been doing with standards, and with open source and stuff like that, suddenly this job seemed to fit perfectly. I’ve not had a career plan. I’ve just, sort of, jumped from thing to thing that I found interesting and has coincided with what I’ve been doing anyway, so, yes, it’s mostly luck. Don’t get me wrong, ringtones are fun – but this is actually having a positive impact on people around the world. That’s great. I love it. I’m proud of the team. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done. I’m proud of the departments who have invited us in, been sceptical and gone, “No, alright, yes, we’re going to make some changes to that,” and I’m proud of the fact that, when we go around to departments, they quite often… I had a lovely chat with a department who said, “We’ve done this, and we’ve done that, and we’ve opened this, and we’ve opened that. How are we doing?” (Laughter) When I said, “My goodness, you are just streets ahead of everyone else,” they just beamed with pride. That was absolutely lovely. Sarah Stewart: For the uninitiated, can you explain what open standards are and what open source is? Terence Eden: They’re two very different things. Open standards means that, when you’ve got two computers that want to communicate, the language that they use is standardised. Everyone can understand it. We actually have a 48-point definition of open standards, which I’m not going to go onto here, but basically it’s the organisation which creates it. They create it in an open fashion. That means you can see the process by which it happens and that you can go in and make some changes. They publish it for free – we don’t want government departments to be spending thousands of pounds on standards again and again – and that they have wide international adoption. That’s what open standards are. It just means that our computers can work with computers around the world for free. Sarah Stewart: Tell me about open source. Terence Eden:   People have the right to see how decisions are being made. Open source is about… In one sense, it’s about publishing the code that we use to run bits of the country. You can see how the GOV.UK website is built. All the code is there, but when we start saying, “Okay, this is how a decision is made, this is how systems integrate with each other,” we should be publishing that. There are several good reasons for doing this. Firstly is it increases trust. If you can see, if you’re a user and you can see how this code works, hopefully you will trust it more. Sarah Stewart: So how are we doing in the world stage on open standards? Terence Eden:   Good. Could do better, but I always think we can do better. We’re involved with some EU committees around the world, and we are one of the few governments which are on the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium’s advisory committee. Yes, we are going out, we are leading the way in certain areas, but what we’re seeing – and I think this is fascinating – is some countries leapfrogging us. When I worked for the mobile phone industry, one of the problems with the UK was we had this huge investment in 2G networks, and then another huge investment in 3G networks. You would find countries in Africa which never had, even, landlines before, going, “We’ll just build a 3G network.” They don’t have any of that legacy investment, so they were able to leapfrog us in terms of speed, and connectivity, and price. GDS has been going for, is it, like, six years now? Sarah Stewart: Seven. I think we’re approaching our seventh. Terence Eden: Six, seven years, yes, so, naturally, we’ve got a lot of legacy stuff that we’ve built up. That means some processes which are a bit slow, and that’s fine, but then you see other countries who’ve skipped to the end. They said, “Okay, so we’ve seen all the mistakes GDS have made. We’ve seen what they’ve come out with at the end. We’ll just take that end piece and run with it.” Brilliant, that’s great. I think we have paved the way for lots of people, but there’s always more we can do. Sarah Stewart: So internationally, who do you think is doing good work - which governments are piquing your interest? Terence Eden:  I’ve got to give a shout out to New Zealand. I think they’re doing some amazing things, making their government more open, more transparent, getting on board the open source and the open standards train. That’s partly – that’s entirely – a testament to the people who work in New Zealand’s public service. They absolutely get it, and we’re seeing them spread out around. I know that some of them have gone off to Australia, which is great. We’ve got some GDS alumna off in Canada, and now they are doing brilliant stuff. One of the lovely things about Canada is lots of their digital strategy is on GitHub, so you can just go along and say, “Hang on, you could do something better there,” or even as simple as, “There’s a spelling mistake there,” and fix it. I think that’s wonderful for openness. Sarah Stewart: You’re a bug hunter yourself, aren’t you? Terence Eden: I am, yes. Sarah Stewart: You’re in Google’s Hall of Fame. Terence Eden: My wife and I are, yes. Sarah Stewart: Oh both of you? Terence Eden: Yes. No – well, it was my wife who discovered the bug, and then I reported it, so we’re joint recipients, think. Sarah Stewart: What was the bug? Terence Eden: So Google Calendar, if you typed up a reminder to yourself which said, ‘Email boss@work.com about pay rise,’ if you put that in the subject line, it would automatically copy it to your boss’ calendar. Sarah Stewart: That’s a big bug, isn’t it? Terence Eden: Yes. Basically, yes that’s what happened, so we reported it and they fixed it, but finding bugs is good fun. If people find bugs in government, they should tell us, because we’ll fix them. Sarah Stewart:  So what does your vision of a future government look like, a successful future government, look like? Terence Eden: The government of the future – I hope – will be more open, and it will be more collaborative. I don’t want GDS to be a single government department. I want GDS to be everywhere. I want everyone to know what good looks like and how to code in the open. I think the government of the future will have fewer barriers. Someone asked me the other day what department I was in, and I said, “GDS.” They went, “No, which subdivision of GDS?” I haven’t got a clue. I just work for GDS. Really, I work for Cabinet Office. If I’m completely honest, I work for the civil service. If someone from DWP says, “I need some help with something,” I’m going to go and help them. Of course I will. If someone from anywhere in the country in the civil service says, “We need some help with this,” why wouldn’t I go and help them? I think we need to break down these barriers. If the best team at content design happens to be in Defra, or wherever, great, we should be learning from them. They should be teaching us. I would love it not only if the government of the future was more open, and more transparent, and more open source, and used more open standards, but that the civil service was really just one civil service. It wasn’t just based in London, and that we can… It’s not based in London now, but that we felt free to move more or less anywhere within it and give people the help, and the advice, and the support that they need, and learn from anyone in any department, because we are not Defra, and DWP, and Department for Health and anything else. We’re not. We are one team, OneTeamGov. Sarah Stewart:  It’s really interesting that you've said that – we’re actually recording a podcast with Kit Collingwood from OneTeamGov and DWP fame in December. Okay final question – you’ve hacked your vacuum, your car is on Twitter, your house turns off when you leave it – what’s next? Terence Eden:  The next thing that I’m interested in is biohacking. So I’ve got some fake nails, just like fashion nails, and they’ve got a small bit of computer circuitry in, which is kind of like your Oyster card. It’s an NFC chip, and they glow when I put them around electromagnetic fields, so, if I’m on the tube and I put my hand against an Oyster card reader, my fingertips glow. You can also put data on there, so I can transfer data from my fingertips. That’s kind of silly, but I’m fascinated by how we can enhance people. What are the things that we can put on us and in us which will make us better? That’s what I’m interested in. Sarah Stewart: Terence, thank you so much. Terence Eden: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Sarah Stewart: That brings us to the end of this month’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll listen again next month when we talk to another interesting person about interesting things. Until then, farewell.  

We're in North America talking to Lena Trudeau, co-founder and CEO of Nuage Cloud Strategies, formerly of the Canadian Digital Service in Ottawa and 18F in Washington DC. A passionate public sector leader, Lena has served many tours of duty in government technology, and also spent time at Amazon Web Services growing cloud adoption within government. We chat to Lena about her long career in public service, including at the Presidential Innovation Fellows program in the White House, and how she went on to establish a digital delivery culture in the US government with 18F. We learn why she believes international public servants are a national asset, how the tech world can do better with diversity, and hear her thoughts on empathetic and human-centred leadership models. Lena also tells us why she loves Canadian cultural values, and educates us on the fast-paced world of ice hockey. We get her top bourbon recommendations in preparation for the regular Friday afternoon OneTeamGov celebration!

På konferensen Offentliga Rummet träffar Carl Heath Kit Collingwood, initiativtagare till One Team Gov i Storbrittannien, och Adrian Solitander och Åsa Holmberg från One Team Gov i Sverige. Samtalet kretsar kring One Team Gov,  en rörelse som utgår från sju enkla principer om hur de jobbar för att förnya offentlig verksamhet. Tillsammans arbetar de för […] The post #142 – One Team Gov – samverkan för digitalisering av offentlig sektor appeared first on Podcasten Digitalsamtal.

In our first ever show we talk to Kit Collingwood; co-founder of the One Team Gov public sector reform movement. Kit is a senior civil servant who is passionate about public services that work for everyone, and about modernising government. She cares deeply about new leadership models based on radical empathy, humility, and vulnerability. We chat about how One Team Gov got started, and how it's bringing together disparate communities to take practical action for public sector reform. We hear Kit's reflections on her career in policy and digital; including her role in delivering the first Government Digital Service exemplar, and on leading data teams for the welfare state. Kit also gives her thoughts on how we can make government more inclusive, why Rebecca Solnit is her patronus, and why you should join us at One Team Gov Global event in London on the 16th of July. Visit oneteamgov.uk to apply for your ticket now!