We're still working on the high level stuff for delivering digital admissions. The thing that I am finding is that the further away I get from "the centre" the more like the wild west it becomes. "This doesn't fit the TCOP, there are no user needs, this doesn't look like it is accessible", answer: 🖕. Building things where the rules aren't maintained is hard and don't get me wrong, I'm working on rules, but doing that while doing everything else is difficult.
But it also applies to dependency organisations. We are looking at how users create accounts with Cambridge. It needs to be lightweight with gradually increasing assurance levels as the applicant gets closer to being offered a place/matriculation. Emails are a bad UID because some applicants are handled by agents so we either need to build out an agent login, or better yet, inherit/authenticate login to & from UCAS. Why make a separate sign up process at all. But, I have no influence over UCAS's product plan. It isn't open and their relationship management model doesn't cope well with different parts of the same university having different needs from each other. The university doesn't cope well with that either. But it is weird not being able to call someone up and have an open chat. The feeling of community is not present.
It's also made me feel a little ambivalent about what I'm doing. I have always decided that I do this work because it sits between technology and humans. Most of my reading and writing is about that, it's what I'm interested in. But if you shut down the scope of the human part (we can't talk to UCAS to involve them in your work and feed into their product backlog because reasons) so that you have to pretend that the humans who effect the project are the political reality rather than the practical one, then that can be depressing.
We went out to the Broads with Sym and Rose, it was a lovely break, and we learned what the limitations of camping with a toddler can be 😴
I put together all my existing chapter stubs and notes into one document to make me feel better.
https://twitter.com/blangry/status/1417956047948505090
I'm having a go at writing the disillusionment chapter - another PhD thesis asserts that people often get into civic tech to compensate for feeling like they're doing active harm in their day job (Rider 2021 https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/28956). I think that's certainly one angle with UK civic tech, although I think due to the UK's over-centralisation of government in Whitehall, civic tech is waaaaay less linked to local government than the US, Germany or Brazil. So I think disillusionment brings people in, but it also sends them away.
Until you’ve worked 5–10 years in government or advocacy, you can’t see what needs change. You can’t fix a broken machine until you study it and see how it works. Government isn’t something you can intuit. It doesn’t work like you were taught in school in 6th grade. Not even remotely.
(Tauberer 2015 https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597)
I often send this article to people, but I think it is the core of the work. Civic tech reels you in by saying you can help, your contribution is useful. But it might not be. The thing you build might have no audience, no user need, or it just doesn't point at the right part of the problem.
I saw this thing this week and it made me a little depressed.
https://twitter.com/OneTeamGov/status/1418479145735053312
What's the problem here? Submissions are long? Submissions are on paper? Submissions are too detailed? My experience: submissions are a system of leading the minister to a good answer. They are an opportunity to show off for some people and they are a product of the complex interplay of power between ministers and civil servants. You can't fix that with a wiki or a hack day.
The thing I am learning on this PhD is that the worst thing you can do is frame the problems of modern government as being modern. We've always needed better linked information, we've always had silos and empire building as a challenge to push against and we've always put too much faith in technology saving us rather than understanding the power structures.