Open Nouse — July 2019 Edition. Open Nouse is a monthly update from the…
By: Matt Sawkill
Tags: Community, Civic Tech, Updates, Team Building, Digital Maturity

The Digital.NSW fellowship team speaking at our July Open House event in Sydney.

Open Nouse — July 2019 Edition

Open Nouse is a monthly update from the Code for Australia Base Team, and is one of the ways we put our core value of working in the open into practice. Matt Sawkill Follow Aug 6, 2019 · 3 min read

Here’s what’s been good (🌹), bad (📌) and what’s emerging for us (🌱) the past month.

📌 Thorn — not enough time in the same place

Last month we touched on some of the challenges with the base team’s energy being spread across a number of different initiatives, both in delivery of multiple programs and on internal initiatives. Now that we’re once again working as team of three we’ve got better capacity to cover everything that’s going on, but there have also been some side effects from trying to form a new shape on the fly.

I personally spent a lot of time this month working in Sydney, supporting our Digital Maturity Indicator and Fellowship programs, and exploring opportunities for future partnerships now that the dust is settling after recent changes to the structure of state government agencies. My time in NSW was productive, but I was also ambitious about what we could achieve as a Base Team during this period and made some not-so-collaborative decisions that had an impact on everyone.

We’ll continue to reflect and iterate on the ways we can best support remote teams while maintaining the non-hierarchical, collaborative mechanics that make the Code for Australia base team work.

🌱 Bud — learnings from Digital Maturity assessment

The Digital Maturity Indicator is a new program that we’ve launched in partnership with the Digital HKS team. We’re currently working with NSW’s Public Service Commission and the Better Regulation Division from the Department of Customer Service to tailor the framework (developed with an initial focus on cross-government digital service units) to suit an agency model, and run a series of assessments with leadership and delivery teams.

At the end of the process, each government agency will have baseline metrics for how their digital capability and governance stack up against best practices and will be presented with actionable recommendations to move forward with. We’ll also be able to reflect on common insights from the entire program of work.

Things have been moving a little slowly with research due to typical scheduling issues and some structural changes across government, and our team are currently undertaking interviews with two agencies, with two more about to join the program. We’re excited to start sharing both our process and the outcomes of this work with the global community, and are planning to publish a blog post based on synthesis of the research in coming weeks. I’ll also be speaking about our work with the Digital Maturity Indicator program and capability measurement at GovDX 2019 in Melbourne next week.

🌹 Rose — a new member and shape for the base team

This month the Base Team celebrated the arrival of Soreti Kadir as our new Head of Delivery. Soreti’s empathy, storytelling and determination in meeting challenges stood out during our initial conversations. She’s already proving to be a great fit for the role, which we created to provide support and guidance to the people delivering our programs and the community and government partners they’re working with.

We met some amazing folks during recruitment and were overcome by the quality of people who wanted to be involved with Code for Australia. Grace and I learnt a lot in our efforts to run a transparent and inclusive process and would like to once again thank everyone who applied and met with us over the journey.

Re-forming the Base Team around more clearly defined roles and responsibilities is an important step that will help us scale the team and our influence, as we work towards our vision for a government that is built by and for everyone.