A belated response to Jeni Tennison's request for reckons on what being a digital centre for government might mean.

Jeni's post

I think what GDS initially got really right was what flowed outwards from the centre. Back then everything seemed to flow from the centre. That's where things had started, that's where there seemed to be the greatest concentration of things, and people, and people showing things. So we got exemplars to prove it could be done and to train up the first wave in departments. We got standards, design patterns, a prototype kit, an academy all flowing outwards. We got assessments. And we started to get a platform.

I think this time the emphasis should be different. The focus should be on the flow from a edges to the centre. The flow of ideas, of stories, of actual work, of innovation, so we can all get a better sense of who's out there, what they're doing, and why it's cool.

No, not exclusively, and yes, still to maintain standards, but also with a clearer sense that the centre should be skimming off the cream and actively using that as fuel for what flows out again. So we get more exemplars. So design patterns and kits continually expand and evolve. So the high standards we want, end up being maintained more by show than by tell.

Working around the edge can feel isolating. I think it's a core purpose of the centre to reverse that. There has been a huge amount of great work done on community building across government but all these things need a hub, so all that work can contribute to something greater. Knowing others are struggling with the same challenges is heartening, but being able to see, really see, how you are all contributing to a common goal is a different kind of motivating. And... as useful as having a big fella with a stick in the centre is, maybe it's not as sustainable.

Don't get me wrong I think this stuff is already happening, and I'm aware that I'm often shocking bad at knowing about it. But what I'm talking about here is a matter of emphasis and purpose. A central body who see itself mainly as broadcaster is very different to one who's self-image as more of a mirror to allow others to see themselves and each other.

How can it be done? I don't know. ;-) But I think there are clues. The internet is awash with patterns of mass contribution and various ways that the cream can be made to rise. Not all of these are positive, but they show this kind of thing can be done. Various kinds of voting, activity tracking, usage tracking, consumer ratings etc given a public service twist, watched and iterated.

Information flowing from a distributed edge towards the centre needs to be easily provided so that the energy expended providing it doesn't distract from the real work. How could this be achieved? What information would be best to collect? How might it be used? The prototype kit is a wonderful trojan horse, brought into many projects across government and (I think) capable now of quietly reporting back about how it's been used. Passive transparency. What if this was expanded, made even more transparent, what might we learn about the work that's happening, the patterns being used, the iterations being done. How could this technique be expanded to other areas of work?

And yes, the information flowing back probably needs to be in a somewhat standardised form, in order that it can be understood easily, and compared and contrasted. Not specifically data standards, but maybe just those recognisable (consistent not uniform) things like user needs, hypotheses, problem statements, even prototypes themselves. Templates that people can easily fill with important stuff and that the centre can easily process and mine for value.

Similarly with user research. There are many different libraries, repositories and archives around government. What would a central one look like? How would we contribute? What would we want it to store? How could submissions be judged, evaluated, accepted without unnecessary gatekeeping? Again, some transparency, some working in the open, but facilitated and organised and iterated towards something really useful. Something that would be greater than the sum of it's parts.

I'm not saying any of this is easy, but I do think that this change of emphasis and the challenges it would bring are the right thing for a central body to be focussed on right now. The work is going on now, all over. The challenge is to join it up, to make it all count, to support those people by connecting them in meaningful and useful ways so that instead of a lot of little distributed pools of value sitting separately around the edge, we can allow that value to flow into a centre hub and flow back out in ways that enrich us all.