Jen Pahlka is the author of Recoding America and a pioneer in making government work for people in the digital age.

She founded Code for America in 2010 and in 2013, took a leave of absence to serve as Deputy CTO in the Obama White House and help found the United States Digital Service.

In 2020, she co-founded United States Digital Response, which helps government meet the needs of the public with volunteer tech support.

Her TED Talk, “Coding a Better Government,” has been viewed over 1M times and Wired magazine named her as one of the 25 people who has most shaped the past 25 years.

Recoding America gets right to the heart of what current and future leaders need to be thinking about to make public services better for everyone.

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Website ➡️ https://createchange.io

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Mark is a Deputy Director at the UK Government’s Ministry of Justice, where he leads Probation Digital.

Mark studied law and became a barrister, drawn to the humanity exposed in criminal cases. However, he found it difficult to make a living in this field and moved into commercial law, where he “lost my passion”. He found a new calling in government and joined the MoJ in 2010. Since then, he’s been given the brief of operationalising GDS as its first Head of Agile, launched DfE’s flagship Apprenticeships Service and now leads the delivery of the digital Probation portfolio at MoJ.

Our co-founder met Mark at the Government Digital Service in 2013 and he's been privileged to work with him and learn from him at several government departments since then.

They had a slogan at the Government Digital Service - Trust, Users, Delivery - and in this episode they talk about how these three concepts are at the heart of Mark’s approach to developing government services and and how bringing policy, delivery and operations together can be a game-changer.

0:00 Intro

0:50 Mark’s backstory

3:37 Climbing on the AlphaGov bandwagon

6:17 How trust can be given, rather than earned

8:05 Why empowerment is essential for agile ways-of-working

10:40 Why government struggles to focus on end users

12:39 Leading the digital Apprenticeships service

14:35 Being in the hot seat on a priority government delivery

18:30 How digital helps deliver MoJ’s probation strategy

23:25 Digital is the business

24:00 What’s next for Probation Digital

26:20 Inspirational leaders

28:45 Lesson learned for new leaders in digital roles

Follow Mark Stanley on Twitter at @moonkin

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As CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2010 - 17, Mark Schwartz provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices, overcoming an established planet-sized policy for overseeing the delivery of technology systems.

In this Primer interview, you’ll discover some of the experiences that Mark went through while helping executives from large organizations overcome obstacles to digital transformation, as well as analysing and thinking about what makes a good bureaucracy and what tools are needed to succeed.

Listen to the podcast for some great advice on digitally transforming bureaucracies.

00:00 Introduction

01:07 Mark's backstory

04:40 The US Citizenship and Immigration bureaucracy

09:56 A bad example of a bad bureaucracy

11:56 Management Directive 102

15:42 30 ideas for working with a bureaucracy 

17:09 What did MarkS do with Citizenship and Immigration bureaucracy?

25:11 Benefits of Agile

27:23 Patterns/plays to make when working with bureaucracies 

34:14 Similarities between the private and public sectors when it comes to bureaucracy and digital transformation

36:58 Mark Schwartz's next book

40:06 Top advice for bureaucrats and large organisations working with digital delivery teams

42:04 Words of hope for digital delivery team’s starting up in big bureaucracies

Follow Mark Schwartz on Twitter at @schwartz_cio

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Lou is the author of Good Services the best-selling book on how to design services that work. The book and Lou's Training School are the same name, are based on their experiences as the former director of design for the UK government, where they grew a 2000-strong team of designers into one of the largest and most influential design teams in the UK winning a Lifetime Achievement Award. But job titles and awards don't adequately describe how inspiring Lou has been to the design community and government, not least by being proudly and very visibly dyslexic and non-binary.

Follow Lou Downe on Twitter at @LouDowne

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The 21st-century government needs policy, delivery and digital together to be brought together in an integrated way but very few people are showing how to do it successfully on really big, citizen-facing services. Rachel is one of those people.

In this episode, we interview Rachel Hope, Director of Technology & Data for the NHS Vaccinations programme where she leads the team who built the digital infrastructure behind 126 million jabs.

If anyone can tell us about what it takes to deliver public services at scale in the digital age it’s Rachel.

Follow Rachel on Twitter at @RachelHope3

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Our first interview is with James Plunkett, author of End State (one of the Guardian’s political books of the year). In his book James explores nine big social problems and nine radical ways to put things right but what he says he’s really interested in are the projects these ideas are a part of: how do we upgrade the state so it’s capable of governing a 21st Century economy?

SHOW NOTES

00:00 Intro

00:46 The meeting with Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee that inspired the book

02:35 Industrial Revolution vs the Digital revolution

07:53 Why policymaking needs to become more agile

10:20 Why the politics of 2050 are rooted in ideas that are with us now

13:10 Is UBI a crazy idea that's destined to become common sense?

17:59 Did government become more agile in response to the pandemic?

19:01 Is a crisis a terrible thing to waste?

21:15 Why the most radical new ideas are neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’

25:42 How do public servants take advantage of flux and uncertainty?

34:11 How Citizen’s Advice designs for compassion

Follow James on Twitter at @jamestplunkett

Read his blog at https://endstate.substack.com/

Buy End State: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/james-plunkett/end-state/9781398702202/

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