A Friday thread of niche digital government issues I worry about in the 2020s, from a digital policy lens. In no particular order:

1) How to double down on democracy, including more nuanced and persistent ways to involve people in policy and service design processes. How to convince and reward them for contributing to the country in constructive ways without naïvely dumping responsibility on civic tech.

2) Digital identity. It's time already. But this also needs a razor-sharp examination from a human rights lens throughout the design phase. I worry we'll see this just as a tech problem when it has broader implications. If a government goes bad, what are the protections?

3) Tensions between the carrot and stick of government, service delivery and national security. We've awkwardly split off national security from digital government. Maybe I'm in the wrong rooms but we don't connect digital gov with a comprehensive approach to defence policy.

4) Value propositions and pitfalls of data management and governance. It turns out radically overhauling big departments is really hard . My heart goes out to chief data officers. GC-wide data governance is happening too slowly. Committees aren't working. Need a new approach.

5) Government is still acting a bit like a monopolist when increasingly it seems easier to sit down and sketch out a peer-to-peer competitor for many social programs, warts and all. We need to understand the role platforms like GoFundMe are playing in people's lives v-à-v gov.

6) Govtech, procedural fairness, and equity. We can't buy software that impacts people's rights if we don't know how it works. Open source isn't just about scalability, it's about transparency of the state's instruments of power. The exploitation of data needs an equity lens. Etc

7) Management innovation. Day to day gov hasn't changed at all since 2006 and that's so weird. Everything is still so opaque (eg. what do DM committees talk about and why is none of that transparent?). We still use tiers of committees as decision mechanisms. It's so expensive.

Thank you for following me along this meandering journey. You may now see a pic of my cat Sigmund Freud being a dork.