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Our Transform conference in Canberra is just over a month away (early bird closes Friday 3 March), and we want to share some insights into Dan Sheldon, who is doing double time as workshop presenter and conference speaker. 

Dan’s presentation at Transform is titled The Government IT Self-Harm Playbook. This draws on a highly influential article Dan published on Medium on 31 October last year of the same name, which is a bit of a must-read if you’re interested in government digital transformation.

In his Transform talk, Dan will walk you through an A to Z of the worst government IT anti-patterns and show how we get from traditional, outsourced, waterfall IT to delivering digital services that users love.

And he has the background to cover this in detail.

“I’m currently the Digital Strategy Lead for the Department of Health, where I’m helping the department understand its role in the new digital healthcare economy. Previously I helped start up the new NHS.UK service.”

The National Health Service, that’s quite some project.

You can see in Dan’s immediate work history how he got to that kind of scale, but what’s also interesting is to look at what he was up to when he was younger and how that might have influenced some of his approach today.

In 2001, Michael Lewis published a book called Next: The Future Just Happened, about how emerging technology can turn the existing power structures of society upside down.

You might know Michael Lewis from Liar’s Poker (Wall St greed in the 80s), or Moneyball (data-based approach to pro sport), or The Big Short (the US housing bubble), or any of his other books.

In Next, he went looking for someone to talk to about Gnutella, the peer-to-peer file sharing network formed in 2000.

Together with a small team of web surfers I went looking for an articulate spokesman for the revolutionary point of view. Less than a year after its formation the movement was already too far-flung for one person to investigate it easily. The Napster Flood had fragmented it into what was essentially a lot of small, informal R&D projects. There were dozens of web sites and chat rooms and message boards devoted to Gnutella, and its potential successors.

Eventually, a spokesperson is tracked down in England.

“Oldham.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Outside Manchester.”
“Let’s go see him.”
“There’s a problem”, said David, “He’s bright, very articulate.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“He’s got to check with his mother.”

Daniel Sheldon was fourteen years old.

Once Lewis has reassured Dan’s mother his visit is not related to Warner Brothers’ demands regarding Dan’s Harry Potter fan website, Daniel goes on to give Lewis some keen insights into the role of technology in the exercise of rights and the empowerment of the anonymous online individual.

“Well”, he said, “look at my own experiences. Look how different that is from anything that has ever happened in the real world. I couldn’t walk into a traditional business, aged thirteen, and expect a fully paid job, and start ordering people about. But in the digital world I can do that. Have done it. It brings me to the same level.”

It’s very much a book worth reading.

By the time it was published, Dan had founded Boomselection, an MP3 blog that promoted mashup challenges for bootleggers, mixing and mashing recorded tracks to create new audio artworks.

In the few years of its existence, Boomselection attracted hundreds of participants from all over the globe, thousands of submitted tracks and quite a bit of interest from litigious copyright holders.

Dan attended the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2005-10, emerging with a degree in Government, and the experience of having been elected by LSE students to serve in a full-time sabbatical leadership role as Communications Officer for the Student Union with specific responsibility for managing all central communications, marketing, fundraising and publications including a weekly newspaper.

Having sourced external funding of £30,000 to overhaul the web presence of the union, and led staffing restructures and cross-union collaborations, Dan ended up on:

“a four-member trustee board, overseeing a charitable membership organisation serving 9,000 students with 25 full-time employees, five commercial services and a turnover of over £2.5 million.”

Daniel then worked for a year as Campaigns Director at the Union of Jewish Students, the chief political representative for the 8,500 Jewish students in the UK and Ireland, further honing his political, economic management, civic leadership and positive disruption skills.

It would have been no surprise that in 2010 Dan also started the ultimately successful No to 55% campaign against proposed changes to the rules governing the dissolution of Parliament.

In 2012 Dan joined Methods, where he helped start Methods Digital, helping big business, government departments and public bodies transform their operations and their service delivery.

Dan worked on forward thinking cloud strategies for local government and established breakthrough strategic partnerships with non-government partners like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Box.

From there, Dan’s path took him to a position as Senior Technology Advisor at the Government Digital Service and on to his current role as Digital Strategy Lead for the Department of Health.

Here he is in action at a panel session for the UK Data Service’s Data Impact 2015 event in December 2015:

From teenage undergound file sharing spokesperson to one of the key figures driving the digital transformation of UK government information and services is quite a path, and you get the feeling Dan Sheldon has a lot more to achieve yet.

If you want to keep up with Dan’s work, you can find him here:

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheldonline
medium: https://medium.com/@sheldonline
nhs.uk blog: http://transformation.blog.nhs.uk/author/dan-sheldon
twitter: https://twitter.com/sheldonline
website: http://www.sheldonline.com/about/

If you want see Dan in person, come along to Transform 17 in Canberra at the end of March. See you there.