I gave a 5 minute lightning talk at the Service Design in Government (@SDinGov) conference on Monday 19 May 2014. The topic was, “Has UKGovCamp affected public sector service design?”. This blog post is about what I said (scroll past the photos below if you’re in a hurry to read it).
What is the UKGovCamp unconference?
An unconference is different from a conference in 2 special ways: –
- its a discussion – Q&A happens throughout, not at the end
- there is no set agenda
Attendees pitch their session idea at the start of the day
Photo by Sasha Taylor https://www.flickr.com/photos/sashataylor/12158464774
A time and space is allocated for each discussion.
Photo by David Pearson https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidpea/12132960804
People then vote with their feet and attend whichever sessions they want.
Photo by David Pearson https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidpea/12154492645
What I said in my SDinGov lightning talk
I’m not a fan of conferences. I like asking questions, giving answers and being challenged. Unconferences are great for that. Conferences less so. So to find out whether UKGovCamp affects service design in the public sector, I knocked up a survey and tweeted a few people.
The survey had 2 questions: –
- Has UKGovCamp affected public sector service design?
- How has UKGovCamp affected public sector service design?
Of the 221 people I contacted, 75 (34%) responded and answered the 1st question
- 8 (11%) No
- 46 (61%) Sort of, kinda indirectly
- 21 (28%) Yes, its had a direct effect
2 people tweeted me saying they couldn’t answer the question, because they didn’t know, e.g.: – 
Lesson learnt here is always include a “I don’t know” answer.
The 2nd question was more challenging, and only 39 (51%) of original 75 answered it.
Some themes emerged, the main one being several people believe UKGovCamp helped bring the Government Digital Service (GDS) into existence.
Rather than go through other themes and responses that emerged, I told the audience I’d tweet the data using the #SDinGov hashtag, and we headed off to the pub.
The following evening, I had more time to study the themes. I re-read each response to the 2nd question and summed, up in a word, what I thought the main theme was for each. This isn’t highly objective, so please feel free to download the data and try for yourself.
Here are my results:
- 9 (26%) community
- 7 (20%) learning
- 6 (17%) gds
- 5 (14%) data
- 3 (9%) fail
- 2 (6%) user
- 2 (6%) delivery
- 1 (3%) design
This means that 46% of people who answered the 2nd question, felt community or learning were the top affects UKGovCamp had on service design. Only 14% felt it influenced the creation of GDS.
So although I was correct in saying it was one of the top themes, it wasn’t THE top theme. That was community 🙂
You can view the full dataset via http://j.mp/ukgovcamp-service-design-survey
Public Sector stuff 