Run by the wonderfully energetic John Allsopp, Web Directions 2015 is a cross-disciplinary conference for those blessed with living the Southern Hermisphere . It’s been going since 2004, and was held this year in Luna Park, a surreal 30s-era funfair in the shadow of Sydney Harbour bridge.
I was invited to give the closing keynote on digital transformation of public services, entitled “Enough Lipstick on Pigs“. I’ve put the presentation online; video to follow.
Here’s a link to the presentation I gave to this year’s Code for America Summit.
It explains why I believe a new institutional architecture is required to support a natively digital nation, and what form these new institutions might take.
It’s basically me presenting the ideas of Richard Pope.
The video of the talk will be more meaningful, but people afterwards were nagging me a url of the presentation, so this’ll do for now.
[update] Here’s the video of the talk and demo.
Code for America are a fantastic US not for profit, injecting digital thinking into all levels of the US Government through a range of initiatives. For example, they’ve been instrumental in the setting up of the nascent US Digital Service.
Last year Mike gave an overview of the UK Government Digital Service at their annual Summit in San Francisco. This year I had the pleasure of showing off some of the digital transformation going on across the UK government, both with and without the help of GDS.
Great to meet so many fine people; friends old and new. A long, rich conversation with the mayors of Miami and Sacramento was a particular highlight of the visit; they showed such awareness of the issues that mattered to their citizens, allied with a seriously crunchy clarity of accountability.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the D14 Conference in Glasgow.
I had a fine day, going to several interesting workshops, and catching up with old friends from my BBC and Channel 4 days. The speech itself seemed to go ok; the questions were excellent.
And in my talk I was invited by the organisers, Interactive Scotland, to do some gentle future gazing. So if you already know about GDS and GOV.UK, skip to about 19m30s in which is where the new stuff starts.
Earlier this year I was honoured to be invited to talk at Webstock 14.
Webstock is a truly fabulous, unique conference, organised for the pure love of the web, not the money. If you get a chance, go. As a speaker, it was easily the best organised conference I’ve attended, as well as the friendliest.
While in Wellington, I shared the UK experience of digital transformation with civil servants from the New Zealand government, and met up with representatives of many other southern-hemisphere governments. I was especially pleased to meet the team re-using GOV.UK open source code on the beta of the New Zealand equivalent, beta.govt.nz
In September last year I gave a talk at the (excellent) Mind the Product conference about the lessons I learned leading the alpha and beta of GOV.UK. The 2013 conference is scheduled for September 27th 2013. If you’re a digital product manager, find a way to get a ticket.
Tom Loosemore 