Trust to Innovate - GOVIS 2024
Since its inception in 1991, GOVIS has evolved from the Government Information Systems Managers’ Forum into a vibrant community of practice, dedicated to serving government employees. The annual two-day conference has consistently provided valuable opportunities for learning and networking, cementing GOVIS's reputation for delivering experiences that are not just enlightening, but also a prudent investment of time and resources for public servants.
This year’s two-day event was held in Wellington, New Zealand on the 5th and 6th of August 2024. There were some excellent workshops held on the 5th that I unfortunately could not attend, but I was very honoured to be invited to be on a panel on the 6th. I thoroughly enjoyed attending what was a very professionally run day (thanks to the hard work of the GOVIS volunteers led by Chris McDowall, the conference convenor).
I was likely the least tech savvy member of the audience, but there were a couple of standouts for me. Firstly, I was blown away by the first keynote speaker, Maria English, CEO of ImpactLab, presenting on what can government learn from the charity sector about using data to understand impact? We learned about their social value calculation that enables understanding of how interventions help change lives for the better by combining the cost of an intervention with the social value to create a picture of the Social Return on Investment (SROI). Just imagine how adopting this in the public service would increase our public trust and help us to tell our impact stories to support investment? It would also give us a clear view of where we are not having the impact our citizens want, and a chance to pivot to a better way of doing things.
I really enjoyed being on the panel discussing trusting the government with AI, Chaired by Phil Pennington from Radio New Zealand. My fellow panellists were Emma MacDonald, Director of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and Stats NZ, and Allyn Robins, AI Lead at Brainbox, a public interest think tank specialising in the intersection of technology, law and policy. The main takeout was that the public service needs to be ‘trusted to innovate’ by finding ways to safely and transparently experiment, see what works, and demonstrate competence/reliability. My point that we need to ensure we keep our inhouse data analysts and tech professionals and to increase public service AI literacy if we are to explore developing our own LLM seemed to go down well with the audience.
The final keynote for the day was Jonnie Haddon, GM of Government Innovation at Creative HQ. Jonnie gave us all that late afternoon boost with his fresh look at trust in democratic government, presenting his three blueprints for a trusted democracy. I thoroughly enjoyed the playful insights he shared with us, and you can rest assured I am tracking him down for a bigger conversation about this for our CBF Hub, so more to come on that in the future.
Yours in service to the public