By Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.
⬅️ Read my previous weeknotes
It’s been a while since my last weeknotes! I should be honest and start calling them monthnotes, and then work from there.
In any case, some things I’ve done since I last time:
- Visited Lyme Regis to do a curing and smoking meat course at River Cottage and fossil hunted on the coast. There was an unexpected amount of butchering in the course - it’s made me see meat in a different light. The number, size and shape of fossils in the jurassic coast are impressive too!
- Talked to the content community of practice about content critiques. I was hoping to learn how other organisations in Wales run them and embed bilingualism into them.
- Went to a content meetup in Cardiff that Nia organised with Suzanne Donovan and met some new content people there, and some others in person for the first time.
- Attended Caroline Jarret’s talk at Content Club: “Getting forms right: How better words lead to better results”. It was awesome, but I forgot to ask what her worst pet peeve is when it comes to forms.
- Started reading Richard Pope’s Platformland: an anatomy of next-generation public services - really enjoying it!
- Attended some usability testing as a note taker for some content I’ve put together. Highlight: they said it was “quite interesting and quite thoughtful”.
- Just signed up to Jack Garfinkel’s Disability, language and inclusive design at Digital Leaders Week next month.
Had a brilliant time at SDinGov last week in Edinburgh. Hope to do a better write-up of my thoughts from the conference, but some things still bouncing around in my head are:
- From Rachel Coldicutt’s talk:
- What does devolution mean for digital?
- FOMO isn’t a strategy and it doesn’t work in the long term.
- Service delivery as care, and what if the role of government is to make what we have better instead of completely different.
- From Audree Fletcher’s talk:
- Explanatory optimism, showing up optimistically, and consistently pointing out change and small wins.
- Optimism as activism. Influencing your environment and ‘activating’ those around you.
- ‘Change mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddling and stalling, not via one great leap.”, Rebecca Solnit.
- From Whitney Quesenbery’s talk:
- “Democracy is a design problem.”
- It’s hard to trust something that you don’t understand. Related: ‘Trust is very hard if you don't know what you're trusting.’ Marianne Williamson.
- From KA McKercher’s talk:
- From Jaskiran Kang’s talk:
- The design of services as orchestration, and the importance of designing the culture behind them.
- From Lynne Roberts and Mica Moore’s talk:
- Governance as an enabler to supporting people to make the right thing in the right way. What is ‘just enough governance’? “The need to transform governance to transform government”.