Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

tl;dr

If you work in or with Governments of all levels on service delivery, our new conference, Transform, in Canberra on May 19th, is designed to help you more deeply understand delivering user centred Government digital services.

Why Transform?

When we started what became Web Directions back in 2004, many of the attendees of our early conferences worked in or with Government, reflecting the enthusiasm Governments around the world showed for this then still far from mainstream technology for better (and less expensively) serving the needs of their citizens.

But a piece or two of the puzzle was missing. First, access to the Web was still largely restricted to the workplace, schools, and libraries, while a home computer with internet access was still a relative rarity, and any connection speed above 56Kbps anywhere even more so. So many of those who engage most with Government were less likely to have the capacity to do so, making a trip to the relevant Government office, as difficult as that might be, or a phone call, still far more accessible than using a Government service online.

The second key challenge to the adoption of online Government services was that our understanding of how to create usable services online was far more nascent than it is today.

In the intervening decade or so, the first of these challenges has been for the most part addressed, with internet widely adopted at home, and inexpensive mobile and tablet devices, coupled with the dramatic fall in prices for more traditional computers meaning accessing online government services is far more convenient, and far more widely possible.

In many ways though we’ve only begun to address the second part of the equation, creating user centred government digital services, but this is definitely being done.

In 2011 the UK Government started a stealth mode project, alpha.gov to radically change how Governments deliver services–to be “digital by default”, user centred, and driven by user research and design. The Government Digital Service (GDS) has become the Gold Standard for similar projects around the World, like the US Digital Service, and Australia’s own Digital Transformation Office, which is closely modelled on the extremely successful GDS, and indeed populated by many of its most experienced practitioners and leaders.

The GDS sought to not only do Government better, but document, codify and share how others can do so as well. In essence they’ve sought open source Government publishing processes, and code at Github that others can freely share and reuse what they’ve learned and experimented with.

And they’ve had tremendous success, by any measure, including

• GOV.UK is the 25th most visited site in the UK, with 12 million unique visitors a week.
• The UK Government states that GOV.UK saves the Government £60M a year

So successful has it been that a Conservative UK Government with a very cost conscious approach to Government spending increased its funding to the organisation.

At Web Directions, we’ve been watching this whole arena closely for some time, indeed since the earliest days of the GDS, a project dubbed alpha.gov. At @media, the conference we ran in the UK a few years back, one of the designers from that project, Paul Annett, spoke about the project and the novel approaches they were taking. Sadly, back then we didn’t video conference presentations.

And we’ve long been thinking about a conference focussing on this issue and in the light of the establishment of the Australian Government’s Digital Transformation Office, we felt the time was right to create such an event, focussing on the new approaches to exploring, researching, designing and delivering user centered Government. For many months we’ve been talking to and consulting with folks who’ve been doing this, about what they’d like to see, what they feel is important for people to understand right now, which all fed into our brand new event, Transform.

Transform is a single day conference featuring Dana Chisnell from the US Digital Service, Dan Hon from Code for America, a number of people from Australia’s Digital Transformation Office, and former GDS expert now working at the DTO Leisa Reichelt, all alongside legendary User Experience expert Jared Spool. Our aim is to help Australian decision makers and practitioners in Government Digital Service Delivery, whether in Government at Local, State or Federal levels, or working with Governments of all levels.

Keen to come? We’ve made Transform as affordable as possible, at $599 until April 8th, with $100 off for people working in Local Governments, and independent professionals who contract to Government.

We also have a more hands-on workshop with the US Digital Service’s Dana Chisnell, and User Experience legend Jared Spool on May 18th, again just $599 if you book by next April 8th or register for both by next Friday for just $999.

We’re excited to be bringing together such an amazing lineup, on an incredibly important subject area, and hope to see you there.