I'm late writing again. "Fortnight Note" doesn't have the same pleasant cadence, but it is a more accurate summation of the way I'm writing at the moment.
I've been doing a lot of delivery work trying to support the team with closer integration loops between design and delivery. I will wait to see whether it is working or not. What I can't put my finger on at the moment is what I can do to make it much easier for people to pair on work unprompted. Right now I feel like I need to schedule it in, but it's a really inefficient problem of siloing information.
I've also been having lots of conversations about what a discovery exercise should look like and what a live service with ongoing research needs and, more importantly, how do we hire the right people for that. We don't really do contractors, so making sure that we're building adaptable teams is key, but that's still really hard. There's a problem of not knowing a lot of data to make decisions with. I don't know which services are the most broken, I don't think we have enough of a service level backlog of what we want to take on when to be able to make good judgements about people that we need. I'm going to start scoping things I think can give us better information, but right now, that is a hard problem.
There was also something tangential to the product in the FT a week ago (https://www.ft.com/content/bbb7fe58-0908-4f8e-bb1a-081a42a045b7), a story about a load of private school parents being rather sore that the cash they spent didn't get their kid in to Cambridge. One of my core stakeholders is in their pointing out that the places to applicant ratio is 4x more competitive than it was in 1990 (the generation when a lot of these parents applied) and looking at the decision metrics they use. Honestly, it is fascinating to see what happens when the cosy arrangements of privilege get disrupted and what the effects on the whole sector are.
I've hit a dead end writing about neutrality and ngoisation. I keep re-iterating the point that in order to be taken seriously by government (and deemed as "safe") groups have to adapt their language to become more like the civil servants that they lobby. It has a lot of relevance to campaigning organisations within civic tech, but I have got a bit stuck writing it all out, so I'm having a break.
I'm working on starting the chapter on user research as a failed tool of radical possibility. It's challenging me a bit because I'd been writing up civic tech as not involving GDS et al, but I think to explain user needs framing and design ethnography, I have to involve them and talk about the spectrum in the 2010s between government, startups and civic tech. Anyway, I am enjoying finding books about this (there seems to be a rich literature on design anthropology and its troubles since the 1970s). I am going to use my staff card to borrow books from the university library here next week rather than needing to schlep to Oxford or London for them.
https://twitter.com/blangry/status/1412132554409447426
Still tired. Making progress with the garden and the wild flowers that Bruce hasn't squashed.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7mWme3thlG4cHsluKdtTIJ?si=a5393b4e54da4904
There's a new Ceephax album out and I love this track, mostly because it contains a perfect sample of the cheesy jingle for Calgon descaling powder from the 90s. I like that as it means it qualifies for my playlist of tracks with household products sampled along with these two:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4L61Ul0TUMWUOWvLfrELRJ?si=62d96249fbe44110
He's fine.
