Keynote: Government as a Platform

welcome everybody to the opening keynote for drupalgov 2020. hello all my name is alfred deeb and i work for salsa digital we are a gov tech company that is really focused on helping governments become more open more connected and more consolidated it gives me great pleasure to introduce our opening keynote i'd like to start by setting some context so today as customers of high-tech innovation companies we are privileged to interact with their great platforms you know providing really great user experiences you know think amazon think uber think ebay um this sets a precedent today as citizens of government however we have been less fortunate to have equally great user experiences and interactions you know fragmentation silos and proprietary technologies are among many of the prohibiting factors certainly not easy problems to solve fortunately however there are champions within government that are focused on really trying to help solve these problems one such champion is lee dalset lee is an all of government enterprise architect from across the ditch uh can i say that um lee comes to drupalgov this year to really get us thinking about how governments can be part of this platform revolution to enable co-creation and co-innovation between governments themselves as well as industry so please join me to welcome lee welcome lee dawsett kiara lee kiara everyone can anyone hear me superb well that's a lot better than the introduction i'll introduce myself everyone my name is lee dowsett um i'm an enterprise architect with the new zealand government functional leader for digital and ict the gcdo um i'll be talking to you today about a topic which is perhaps a bit less drupal and a bit more gov and will hopefully blow a few minds and really stretch how we think about uh how technology can change government um so i'll just get a my spectacular power point up and hope that everyone can continue to hear me i'll check back out of the um full screen now and then to make sure that uh you all still can uh so again kia ora everybody that's uh um hello in in new zealand um i need to make a quick uh disclaimer first that this is not new zealand government policy and i'm not actually representing the new zealand government and government chief digital officer or the new zealand government here um government as a platform is a really fascinating set of ideas which i unfortunately for me did not make up i need to acknowledge term o'reilly who published uh about 10 years ago this uh rather opaque tract on what this is information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset citizens are connected by like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance in this model government is a convenient and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action how does government become an open platform that allows people outside and inside government to innovate you can find the rest of uh his work at that link there uh after the presentation now uh that's not the easiest and most accessible set of concepts right there and i want to acknowledge uh richard pope at the harvard kennedy school who did some really great work in uh sort of redefining government as a platform over the last couple of years and what he says at the very top of his work is reorganizing the work of government around the network of shared apis and components open standards and canonical data sets so that public servants businesses and others can deliver radically better services to the public more safely efficient and accountable and you can find his work at that url as well so you've probably all heard of the platform economy uh you've probably all used it whether you're aware or not when you book airline tickets through google or something like that when applied to government that platform economy is really what we're talking about and the key technology behind that is the rather humble web application programming interface been around for a long time it's been through a lot of iteration and in a nutshell that's what it's about there are other technologies that are relevant but apis are in fact the key so let's talk about applying this so what does government do that could be analogous to the platform economy and be built on as a platform governments fundamentally whether they be local state federal or any other kind of government they fundamentally create policy and regulation they then implement that policy in regulation in order to prevent bad things by compliance services and requirements to help people and protect the environment via entitlement services they hold and provide generic and customer specific information and they express rules that customers are expected to implement correctly themselves and of course they produce content all of these things are relevant to the concept of government as a platform i want to make a quick comment about the word customers there is no single word that encapsulates all of the people that government touches in all of their various capacities and so i've just chosen to use customers for this but for that you could read citizens or people or those people in other contexts so boiling down further what government has platform at its core means is that public service agencies again in local state federal national whatever jurisdiction build lots of application programming interfaces that subject to the appropriate identity and consent provide public data such as your birth record about private sorry such as electrical public data such as say traffic information so that's non-specifically about a person and not really privacy relevant transactions such as requesting a driver's license or any of the other transactional points of contact that people and businesses have with government and rules such as the actual calculation of the benefit so uh whether you have an income low enough then you are of a certain group or whatever it might be as well as content such as information about the anatomy of government and of course many many other things so who would then use those apis that have been built over those transaction points and pieces of information so first of all the agency that publishes the api would use them itself uh i'm sure there's enough people who have experienced the uh the multiplicity of things that many government agencies do and the um the difficulty of working together internally and so the first group that would use it would be yourself essentially secondly other government agencies as well as contracted service providers who are contractor to provide services to the public on behalf of government thirdly the private sector we're talking banks insurance companies software providers like say xero or myob fourth the community sector and this includes uh cultural groups and fifth individuals so they're the uh increasingly famous term civic hackers and things like that i'm just going to check back so because i can't see the main screen to make sure that everyone's not yelling at me for not being able to be heard and again jonathan i apologize for the word customers so the the guts of this what would that allow us to do if we created apis and put them on the internet to be appropriately available to anyone who could use them ethically and uh provide public value uh the first thing we could do is to provide integrated services now that's a concept we've been exploring in new zealand for some time which is that we create services that uh serve customers by giving them access to transactions information and rules in sets which makes sense to them which combine their needs to get their needs together in ways that make sense so we have one called smart start which is for new parents and that provides information and service from across and outside government rather than from a particular agency now that's a very very different experience for a start that we can offer our respective uh countries our respective peoples because in many many countries services are traditionally structured and bounded by organizational silos secondly the very nature of apis means that they can be used from more than one experience meaning that different experiences such as services expect specifically for the blind are possible as opposed to using a screen reader over the top of a website or something like that so that that idea of being able to provide really uh wildly different things whether that might be a siri or a google assistant skill or something like that as opposed to basing things on text on a screen necessarily but of course we would always do that as well provide text on the screen thirdly the ability for non-governmental groups and this is a juicy one including indigenous peoples to participate more richly in providing government services communities so right now in new zealand we provide uh we provide services from a single point to everybody and we essentially don't uh act on the idea that maybe people don't really want to deal direct with government where because they don't necessarily trust government or the services that governments don't meet their needs or that discriminate against them and things like that so there's a lot of interest globally in providing indigenous peoples particularly providing parallel services and what government as a platform allows us to do is particularly the transactional services would allow a partially parallel offering so for other people who don't work directly for government to provide services to people but maintain things like national registers of information so again driver's licenses health information whatever it might be using the integration that government as a platform offers to seamlessly provide that without uh having to those people actually having to deal with government directly fourth omnichannel so we provide services in person we provide services over the phone we provide websites those are often siloed in themselves they don't share the same channels for transactions they don't share the same information it is difficult to keep that appropriately the same and up to date and we spend an enormous amount of effort and money doing that and we also don't provide an experience which is aware of other channels so omni channel is the fourth thing so we've got a few more here to go through on what that would allow us to do so next up it would allow us to leverage the trust and the relationship between intermediary and person from that mutual benefit so when you work with your bank or your insurance company or if you're a business your accounting provider or many or your doctor or you are your lawyer or many other things there's an implicit trust relationship there which means that the information that is present with that intermediary about you or your business is quite likely to be correct and real and you are likely to trust giving that intermediary that information and trust that they will look after it and so government is a platform that's opening up of experience to cooperating with intermediaries is allows us to actually use that trust to make sure that supplied information to government that the compliance is done within in a a trusting relationship which doesn't necessarily exist with government directly it also allows potentially a better experience or no experience which ties into our next one here which is that there is the possibility for less effort for the public to provide the public service with information or government with information that is already recorded so you're um and trustworthy so for example your financial information that's held by that bank or accounting provider government needs to know about that for taxation purposes or statistics and things like that but why should people go through the effort to supply that information directly when it exists in these other places that they have a trust relationship with who are motivated to be trustworthy by their position and provided providing services to people and not to act maliciously and using the apis that we discussed before that information could be with the appropriate consent and identity and all of that stuff be provided to government and automated fashion as opposed to a laborious fashion at premier next the reverse of that which is that government holds an enormous amount of information about people uh it starts with things like passports and citizenship and goes out into a whole variety of other areas that we deliberately and rightly hold information about people but that information could add value to them in other contexts so in new zealand and a lot of other places uh we have example of any money laundering rules which requires uh when you open the bank account for example that the the bank um gather and substantiate a whole bunch of information about you before they can give you service and so the idea of government is a platform being present and a lot of that information being available against appropriate consent and security via api and the trustworthiness of that being a sound is convenient because it came from government allows a significant listening and effort and pain for both the intermediaries on that side and their customers who are of course ultimately the same people we're serving next a couple of uh slightly less straightforward ones so uh having uh more government data available via api and in appropriate real time allows the possibility for a great deal more public value and insight from government health information and i came across a really nice example of this in taiwan the other day i wasn't in taiwan obviously no one yet none of us get to travel internationally right now but taiwan uh as a part of their covered response mandated mask use and uh had of course to manage um quite a bit of a supply chain around providing those masks or the mandatory use of them and what uh taiwan did led by audrey tang their quite famous digital minister uh put a public api over the top of that fairly simple real-time supplier information about mask supply and location and opened up that api to civic hackers in taiwan positively minded people who then provided to proceeded to build 140 odd applications over the top of that information uh providing the ability for the public there to respond accordingly to where the masks were and um and the disposition of them thereby reducing panic buying uh and wasted effort on trying to find masks where they were moving them to where they were next up is the concept of rules which we've touched on a few times already in this talk and this one is big enough so that it could probably necessitate its own talk but we'll touch on it now so government's career of course create policy and regulation which a good portion of that policy and regulation is relatively deterministic rules an example for you is in new zealand we have the holidays act which uh sets out people's entitlements for annual leave from work uh and was made some time ago uh and has been how do i put this diplomatically um widely regarded as borderline unimplementable because it is ambiguous and subject to interpretation so if we had an a public api which contained the calculation parts of the holidays act and that api was used by things like payroll systems and hr systems in organizations government and not government then that interpretation that is needed to be done every time a text law is turned into computer code does not need to be done anymore so there's a fairly obvious benefit in efficiency there so in terms of effort not needing to be spent that a quote code of course can also be produced as open source code rather than just as an api but the real benefit is in the unambiguous and testable interpretation of those rules which affect all of our working lives so testing means being able to model and statistically model using data and the development of those regulations and iteration of those regulations and provides certainty to the regulator to the people writing and expressing the rules that the deterministic parts of what they're putting out there are going to be interpreted as intended meaning that unintended consequences should be dropped but not removed entirely of course and better results should be achieved from that kind of rules now that doesn't mean that uh policy legislation becomes only if then else statements it means that there is room in these concepts for the human discretion that exists in a great deal of legislation and regulation already and that is very possible to implement in that and we have a number of people around the world who are pretty active and interested in moving on this so there's a lot of things that putting apis up that represent our data rules transactions and content provides there are some bonuses which are outside the direct influence of this so uh as i'm sure many of you are aware apis are quite a good idea just in software architecture anyway because they enable us to chop our functionality into smaller bits we also don't love the pace that ict moves in government and it's fair to say that at least in new zealand and in many places of the world that there are not nearly enough apis around so if we put up apis in order to facilitate government platform we should also be able to accelerate the pace of change in government ict which would mean that because of the importance of that in modern governing and serving the public that we should be able to be considerably more responsive to people's needs particularly with regards to timeliness of change secondly there is a slightly dystopian uh possibility of this of the general uh digital digitizing of government which that leaves interaction purely between people and a computer whether that computer is uh whether that experience is provided by government or via an intermediary but that's actually not fundamentally necessary in this because using government as a platform and smart code and automation over the top of those apis particularly the loans we can give people the ability to help each other whether in a professional capability as public servants and an ngo capability like the citizens of the advice bureau in new zealand which there are likely to be analogues of in other countries or directly helping each other such as the uh the stereotypical auntie helping someone or my son will do that or whatever it might be and the reason for that is that smart automation and information work can help to help that those people to wield the full benefit of government on behalf of other people rather than just what they know from a particular silo and things like that so that ability to broaden the reach of our entitlement and benefit uh thirdly uh as i'm sure you all have come across innovation often isn't particularly easy in a government context or any government context and one of the ingredients to that is that in order to innovate right now we seem to need to get permission from every single stakeholder involved in every single piece of innovation across silos and across different cultures and across organizations and so if we have big parts of what we do available machine readable via api that means that innovation can be performed without necessarily requiring the direct permission of the of conservative voices who actually uh hold the api because of the basic arms link nature of that relationship that of course doesn't mean that that uh regulation for ethical purposes and things like that isn't required which takes me into my final slide so this has gone a little bit faster than i had anticipated but that leaves more time questions or overheats the so the headwinds for this the things that hold us back include that right now in new zealand and in many jurisdictions governments and public services are used to providing the entire continuum of an experience designed to meet the intent of a policy themselves and there's not an enormous amount of trust required in that for most digital experiences that trust does exist in the contracting out of services intended to meet the policy intent in many many areas particularly social but also in business so that's all of the ngos and things like that to provide health services or citizens advice bureau as i mentioned before people like that but there is a the extension of that trust model and without the uh the same movement of money the contractual thing that exists with those ngos into the digital space into the provision of digital service secondly the what that means is that those people are no longer entirely accountable for that and of course with newcomer from new public management in the 1980s accountability has been a very key thing in western democracy western public services which means that um we've been very very concerned about being being accountable and having control in order to supply that accountability which means that um as an exacerbation of what we see and creating apis in the uh in the platform economy which is that ultimately putting one up and out there is an act of faith that if you build it they will come and they will use it that we also need to have faith and act appropriately in order to uh prevent that um idea of accountability from killing the golden goose as it were so that was my last slide there's a nice black screen there so i'm gonna put that away for a second so thank you all for listening um to that and i hope it was interesting i know it's not directly related to drupal but of course apis are related to dirk or the idea of putting uh government information out by content very very relevant to drupal and hopefully it's professionally aspirational for all of us as government professionals and suppliers to government so i'm really happy to take questions by the the um discussion forum i see there are um quite a few most of that is yes i can hear you um well gosh i was in presenter mode um that's fine um hi lee i've just jumped in to help you out yes uh thank you for that and we did sort out the the presentations on the way there so i'll just have a quick look at the questions that are coming through i think yeah we can hear the slides um if we can i think we've got the q a live session going at the moment so if anyone has any questions please post that there and we'll try and answer those as they're coming through apologies earlier for the video i'll try and rerun that at the end of this session we've got a bit of time and i'll play the intro again hopefully would sound this time because there's anyone that's really excited very animal that's right so does anyone have any questions for lee i mean that was great um thank you for your time that was really interesting um it's i just want to respond to jonathan there thanks for your comment yeah i was uh directly involved in network um service innovation lab and the rules of code royals code so that's part of where my interest and involvement comes from in fact i was at the very first lady that set up that lab just trying to see these questions yeah i hope my couch was appropriately scenic yes very much okay you know for sure everyone that i am wearing pants if not shoes okay i can't see any specific questions at the moment so it's quite a lot of information packed in there and um it's a pretty gordon dense subject okay just have a quick look at the q a okay i think that one again i'm just checking the quick discussion forums for anything great thanks okay i think there's some questions about sharing the slides that we'll we'll uh we'll let you know how if we can get those slides shared what i might do now i've got a few minutes left i might display the intro but um thank you lee uh thank you for your time and uh yes if anyone has any questions they can contact lee in the meeting hub actually is open to being connected to um there's ways that you can obviously connect to any of the speakers today uh during the meeting happened during the event so thank you lee and uh let's let's have a quick look apparently some q a recent most recent please share the slides yes okay there is a couple of questions there i can see there absolutely if you go to the q a at the bottom and just click on your starred ones issues uh that is an enormous question uh i presume that's regarding uh uh apis um and government as a platform um the so one of the perks of using uh wrist web apis and things like that is a lot of the um security challenges are quite well understood um in terms of how to uh have intermediaries use them uh how to farm them up there um we understand very well how to uh collectively how to um secure them uh https and actually this and all of those things um i don't quite understand the question about comply with the latest tech issues but this is like running any other piece of tech is that it requires effort and focus um and that being that if it focus needs to continue into the into the physical future um so a broad answer for an odd question uh nathan's question what's the biggest area i've seen and heard when describing gap to policymakers so uh it's really not the easiest thing to actually get people to understand the um the implications of apis themselves of machine readable um machine-readable uh work uh and so uh i think that it requires a basic view of the world which includes that in order to sort of naturally get that so i think um that's that's probably the biggest uh biggest one uh in explaining it and describing it um i think the the second thing i i want to probably repeat is around that that the expectation that maybe they can't control uh the entire continuum of this and there's a certain amount of trust in there uh hello what's the single most important argument for cancer influencing government ages 16 exposed today it's uh so single most important argument that's the thing is that there's actually this is a thing to do which actually has it has many benefits and not all that many downsides because it is not the most expensive thing in the world to create open api and to create apis which are functional and good um especially considering the amount of money that uh governments typically spend on it uh i think the uh that depends on which stockholder you're talking to okay um so if you've got some examples so a policy maker is going to have really really different imperatives to uh an it leader or a chief executive or minister or um or so it really depends on um getting the appropriate concept for the appropriate person i've covered some of them in this presentation um there are other benefits of course um so as a shorthand probably that your sort of i.t stakeholder is going to be more interested in the actual interoperability and reuse and ability to move faster um so jonathan um now that says innovation lab who's doing rules code in new zealand government uh so there is a unit in the new zealand government called better for business which is doing that hosted out of our ministry of business innovation and employment um and i can supply personal contacts to anybody who's interested in that directly um i think it's also worth mentioning that there's a pretty substantial international commitment international community um you can find it on places like like twitter um uh and say for example um uh henry schwartz and nadia webster for example who were associated service innovation they're still working in this in this space uh notably with wellington city council they're at the local government here [Music] morad hello um how to reduce risk of integrated services being used by determined hackers for unlawful purposes so an integrated service uh is simply a website or an app or or that provides services in the way that they are provided now electronically but it doesn't restrict itself to a single organizational silo so i don't necessarily see that it's any particularly more vulnerable to hacking than any other particularly because there's no fundamental need for it to hold information identity information or otherwise because that information should be able to be sourced from the customer or sourced from apis on the fly at the time and there's no particular need for it to hold so um if there's a um i i can expand on that with you but um i'm not sure that it increases our expo it needs to it needs to increase our exposure to that sort of thing any more than the existing uh web services and perhaps it could reduce that because of that um [Music] there's not particularly necessary to be anything but transient that information so back up we've got one minute and nine seconds so let's uh is there a central government source for all government apis we'll just look in government individual government websites i presume you're talking about new zealand signer um we have a web page on digital.gov dot nz which provides uh pointers to the api uh storefronts or platinum or platforms and things like that um there are of course not as many apis as i personally would like there to be at present but we are moving in our own way there uh and last question for 37 seconds um biggest spotlight through the information implementation of the apis coordinate laser government to provide the required data or utilization of the api's generating online i think it's um to be honest in my experience it's been the uh interesting people who commission work and actually including and and apis in in that work so getting over the initial hump of getting them created in the first place um it would be nice to be struggling with coordination rather than than creation and that's me you

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Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020