Working in the Open: Code for Australia’s Plans for 2021
By: Matt Sawkill
Tags: Digital Government, Australian Government, Updates, Civic Tech, Digital Transformation

Working in the Open: Code for Australia’s Plans for 2021

We know from our community survey that you’re interested in what’s happening behind the scenes at Code for Australia. This year we’ll be sharing a series of deeper updates on specific topics, replacing our previous “Open Nous” blog posts. Matt Sawkill Follow Feb 4 · 6 min read

For the first incarnation of this new updates series, I’m going to share our plans for developing our products and services, including some new programs we’ll be launching this year.

Where we’re at

To read a full update on what 2020 was like for us, check out our Impact Report.

2020 was a challenging year to navigate for any organisation, and our focus was on transforming every aspect of our operations and programs to support remote delivery. Supported by a culture based around reflection, we’re proud of how we iterated our way through the chaos.

While 2021 has brought a continuum of challenges on a global scale, we’re also thankful to be in a part of the world that has COVID-19 under control and can start thinking about what comes next for Code for Australia. We’ve heard from our partners in government and friends in the civic tech community about their new normal and have the opportunity to respond with new initiatives for building digital capability that make sense in their context.

Keeping what’s working well

This board is for public consumption! Check it out.

Now that they’re fine-tuned for online delivery, we’re expecting this to be a stable year for our most established programs, the Fellowship and Tech for Non Tech. Feedback from participants tells us that they’re fun to be involved in, good value and fit for purpose and has also provided a lot of insight into what our government partners want more of.

Making some changes

An example of of some of the work we’ve done as part of the DMI program.

2020 was a trickier year for our new Digital Maturity Indicator (DMI) program. Fresh out of a successful pilot phase, we were excited to scale things up — gathering more data from public sector teams to further validate the recommendations we’re making to get their organisations moving up the scale. For obvious reasons, government teams didn’t have a lot of available bandwidth for strategic initiatives in this space.

We’re always looking for partners keen to understand more about their relative digital maturity and how to improve it, and will also be investing our time into transforming the DMI in response to current circumstances. The DMI has proven to be strategically valuable for us, in particular in informing the subject areas we focus on in our education and training work and we are keen to maintain that loop as we scale up those efforts.

We’ll be focussing on a light weight, self-run assessment platform that can generate impact for smaller teams and individuals is our vision, and we’ll be working closely with Lara in her role as lead researcher to bring that to life this year.

If you’re interested in learning more about the DMI head to the link below to listen to a great podcast. 👇

New and improved!

We’re excited to announce two new initiatives that we’ll be developing and launching this year.

1. We’re launching a new advisory service

Our experts helping public sector workers build their digital capabilities!

Designed around the needs of government partners who are tackling complex, whole of government challenges, the opportunity to launch something new in this space is being driven by two key factors:

As digital service units grow and become established across Australian government, they’re increasingly asked to deliver open and reusable solutions that other agencies can leverage. We’re huge supporters of this approach, and recognise the need for “open government” skills and experience that are relatively novel in the public service — learning from the best of collaboration, community management and developer relations demonstrated in the open source movement.

After seven years as a trusted partner for innovation and solution delivery Code for Australia has built a community of experienced digital government practitioners — Fellowship alumni who have gone on to senior roles, industry experts who have worked with us in training roles and public servants who have built their own knowledge through participation in our programs.

With that context, it seems like a logical time for us to bring these groups together. We’re not 100% sure what we’re going to call it yet, but we are confident a more senior, consultative model with the honest, open and human-centric values we’re known for will help deliver some fantastic outcomes.

If you’re a government team working to develop digital products in this space, or a member of our community who would like to solve these challenges, please get in touch.

2. We’re providing training and digital career development for public servants

We can help turn an idea into a reality, best-practice-style.

We’ve had previous success in this space through our Academy and Sandpit programs, which used experts from the private sector to teach design and delivery fundamentals.

As digital maturity across government grows, and project funding becomes tied to design standards and digital assurance, agencies are being asked to prepare business cases informed by user research and run true discovery, alpha and beta phases for new services.

We see a role for our organisation to deliver bespoke training and mentoring, supporting individuals and teams with the skills and methodology they need to lead this work, and get the most value out of their delivery vendors and contract resources.

While research indicates that learning preferences across the public sector are shifting towards “bite size” and self-service platforms, we don’t believe this is the most effective learning model for digital skills. Practice-based, applied learning on real challenges is the way forward here and will be the foundation of our model.

We’re developing a curriculum informed by learnings from our delivery work in the Fellowship and research insights from the DMI. The program will be facilitated online, led by experts in digital government and supported by our new Communities of Practice.

We’re planning to launch a free pilot of this program in the second quarter of the calendar year, so if you’re keen to be involved as a participant or teacher, now is a good time to reach out.

Overall, this is an ambitious slate of new initiatives for our Base Team to take on. With current program delivery really humming, we’re confident that it’s the right time for us to try something new, and we’re excited to have you along for the ride. Stay tuned for more updates here throughout the year.