Weeknotes #4
Each of our eight ‘Digital Era Competencies’ now each feature a full explanatory essay, co-written by me, University of Konstanz Professor Ines Mergel and Harvard Kennedy School professor David Eaves. You can access all the essays from the competencies homepage.
I’m totally biased, of course, but I particularly like our essay about Competency #1, which I think does a nice job of explaining why user-focus is a fundamental competency, not some lovely ‘nice to have’ that should be worked on after the ‘real business’ of government is done. Responding to user needs IS the business of government, this essay tries to explain why.
If you read all eight competencies in sequence, I think you’d have quite a nice story about what a full set of digital era skills looks like for a modern public service leader. I don’t think anything has quite been done like this before, and I’m really pleased we’ve got here.
Real life provides case studies
This week in the UK, where I live, the need for public service leaders to have digital era competencies was put clearly on show, right at the top of every front page.
A failure relating to COVID data collection appears to have come down to the decisions to use spreadsheets in a manner and a context that clearly wasn’t a case of using the right tool for the right job.
It may be wildly optimistic, but I think that if someone was trained on a course designed to give people the skills within our data competency (#7), then they might have asked the critical questions before things blew up.
Open Access Syllabus development enters a new phase
The majority of project energies are currently dedicated to developing our open access ‘teach-the-teacher’ materials for people teaching master’s level public policy and public administration courses.
Having run nine workshops on nine units, we’ve now got a first draft of all the materials. But they’re very alpha, and as things stand they don’t fully benefit from the fact that our core contributors group of eighteen people brings experience and knowledge of the digital government landscapes in at least twelve countries. So we’re now holding a series of intense syllabus development sessions where all eighteen of our contributors meet weekly to improve individual units as much as possible.
Breaking down real classes
One key piece of material we want to give our learners using the syllabus is access to real classes taught by people in our current core group. To that end we’ve been starting to take video of David Eaves’ Harvard Kennedy School classes, breaking them down into short pieces with teaching notes explaining what’s going on in each piece. These will be included in our work as supplemental materials to the main summaries of each unit. I’m especially grateful to Beatriz Vasconcellos who has been doing the hard yards of video editing and materials development on this component.
If you teach a class on some part of digital government or transformation, and you’d like to work with us to record it, break it down, and publish it online as ‘teach the teacher’ materials, we’d love to hear from you.