 Welcome everybody to the opening keynote for DrupalGov 2020. Hello all, my name is Alfred Dieb, and I work for Salsa Digital. We are a GovTech company that is really focused on helping governments become more open, more connected, and more consolidated. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our opening keynote. I'd like to start by setting some context. So today as customers of high tech innovation companies, we are privileged to interact with their great platforms, providing really great user experiences. Think Amazon, think Uber, think eBay. This sets a precedent. Today as citizens of government, however, we have been less fortunate to have equally great user experiences and interactions. Fragmentation, silos, and proprietary technologies are among many of the prohibiting factors. Certainly not easy problems to solve. Fortunately, however, there are champions within government that are focused on really trying to help solve these problems. One such champion is Lee Dalsett. Lee is an all of government enterprise architect from across the ditch. Can I say that? Lee comes to DrupalGov this year to really get us thinking about how governments can be part of this platform revolution to enable co-creation and co-innovation between governments themselves as well as industry. So please join me to welcome Lee. Welcome Lee Dalsett. Kia ora, Lee. Kia ora, everyone. Can anyone hear me? Superb. Well, that's a lot better than the introduction. I'll introduce myself. Kia ora, everyone. My name's Lee Dalsett. I'm an enterprise architect with the New Zealand government functional leader for digital and ICT, the GCDO. I'll be talking to you today about a topic which is perhaps a bit less Drupal and a bit more Gov and we'll hopefully blow a few minds and really stretch how we think about how technology can change government. So I'll just get my spectacular PowerPoint and hope that everyone can continue to hear me. I'll check back out of the full screen now and then to make sure that you all still can. So again, Kia ora everybody. That's hello in Māori, New Zealand. I need to make a quick disclaimer first that this is not New Zealand government policy and I'm not actually representing the New Zealand government and government chief visual officer or the New Zealand government here. Government as a platform is a really fascinating set of ideas which I unfortunately for me did not make up. I need to acknowledge Tim O'Reilly who published about 10 years ago this rather opaque tract on what this is. Information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation. Government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and they have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convenient and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action. How does government become an open platform that allows people outside and inside government to innovate? You can find the rest of his work at that link there after the presentation. Now that's not the easiest and most accessible set of concepts right there. And I want to acknowledge Richard Pope at the Harvard County Kennedy School who did some really great work in sort of redefining government as a platform over the last couple of years. And what he says at the very top of his work is reorganizing the work of government around the network of shared APIs and components, open standards and canonical datasets. So the public servants, businesses and others can red-deliver radically better services to the public more safely, efficient and accountable. And you can find his work at that URL as well. So you've probably all heard of the platform economy. You've probably all used it whether you're aware or not when you book airline tickets through Google or something like that. When applied to government, that platform economy is really what we're talking about. And the key technology behind that is the rather humble web application programming interface. Been around for a long time, spent through a lot of iteration. And in an up shell, that's what it's about. There are other technologies that are relevant, but APIs are in fact the key. So let's talk about applying this. So what does government do that could be analogous to the platform economy and be built on as a platform? Governments fundamentally, whether they be local, state, federal or any other kind of government, they fundamentally create policy and regulation. They then implement that policy and regulation in order to prevent bad things via compliant services and requirements to help people and protect the environment via entitlement services. They hold and provide generic and customer-specific information. And they express rules that customers are expected to implement correctly themselves. And of course, they produce content. All of these things are relevant to the concept of government as a platform. I want to make a quick comment about the word customers. There is no single word that encapsulates all of the people that government touches in all of their various capacities. And so I've just chosen to use customers for this. But for that, you could read citizens or people or those people in other contexts. So boiling down further, what government as a platform at its core means is that public service agencies, again in local, state, federal, national, whatever jurisdiction, build lots of application programming interfaces that, subject to the appropriate identity and consent, provide public data, such as your birth record, private data, sorry, such as your birth record. Public data, such as, say, traffic information. So that's not specifically about a person and not really privacy relevant. Transactions, such as requesting a driver's license or any of the other transactional points of contact that people in businesses have with government. And rules, such as the actual calculation of the benefit. So whether you have an income low enough and you are of a certain group or whatever it might be, as well as content such as information about the anatomy of government and of course many other things. So who would then use those APIs that have been built over those transition points and pieces of information? So first of all, the agency that publishes the API would use them itself. I'm sure there's enough people who have experienced the multiplicity of things that many government agencies do and the difficulty of working together internally. And so the first group that would use it would be yourself, essentially. Secondly, other government agencies as well as contracted service providers who are contracted to provide services to the public on behalf of government. Thirdly, the private sector. We're talking banks, insurance companies, software providers, let's say zero or MYB. Fourth, the community sector. And this includes cultural groups and fifth, individuals. So the increasingly famous term civic hackers and things like that. And I'm just gonna check back because I can't see the main screen to make sure that everyone's not yelling at me for not being able to be heard. And again, Jonathan, I apologize for the word customers. So the guts of this. What would that allow us to do if we created APIs and put them on the internet to be appropriately available to anyone who could use them ethically and provide public value? The first thing we could do is to provide integrated services. Now that's a concept we've been exploring in New Zealand for some time, which is that we create services that serve customers by giving them access to transactions, information and rules in sets which make sense to them, which combined then needs to get in ways that make sense. So we have one called Smart Start, which is for new parents. And that provides information and service from across and outside government rather than from a particular agency. Now that's a very, very different experience for a start that we can offer our respective countries and our respective peoples because in many, many countries, services are traditionally structured and bounded by organizational silos. Secondly, the very nature of APIs means that they can be used from more than one experience, meaning that different experiences such as services, specifically for the blind, are possible as opposed to using a screen reader over the top of a website or something like that. So that idea of being able to provide really wildly different things, whether that might be a Siri or a Google Assistant skill or something like that, as opposed to basing things on text on a screen. Necessarily. But of course, we would always do that as well, provide text on a screen. Thirdly, the ability for non-governmental groups, and this is a juicy one, including Indigenous peoples, to participate more richly in providing government services to communities. So right now in New Zealand, we provide services from a single point to every vote. And we essentially don't act on the idea that maybe people don't really want to deal direct with government because they don't necessarily trust government or the services that governments don't meet their needs or that discriminate against them, things like that. So there's a lot of interest globally in providing Indigenous peoples, particularly providing parallel services. And what government as a platform allows us to do is particularly the transactional services would allow to a partially parallel offering. So for other people who don't work directly for government to provide services to people, but maintain things like national registers of information. So again, driver's licenses, health information, whatever it might be, using the integration that government as a platform offers to seamlessly provide that without having to, those people are actually having to deal with government directly. Fourth, omnichannel. So we provide services in person, we provide services over the phone, we provide websites. Those are often siloed in themselves. They don't share the same channels for transactions. They don't share the same information. It is difficult to keep that appropriately the same and up to date. And we spend an enormous amount of effort and money doing that. And we also don't provide an experience which is aware of other channels. So omnichannel is the fourth thing. So we've got a few more here to go through on what that would allow us to do. So next up, it would allow us to leverage the trust and the relationship between intermediary and persons from what mutual benefit. So when you work with your bank or your insurance company or if you're a business, your accounting provider or many, oh, your doctor or your lawyer or many other things, there's an implicit trust relationship there, which means that the information that is present with that intermediary about you or your business is quite likely to be correct and real. And you are likely to trust giving that intermediary that information and trust that they will look after it. And so government is a platform that's opening up of experience to cooperating with intermediaries. It allows us to actually use that trust to make sure that I supply the information to government that the compliance is done within in a trusting relationship which doesn't necessarily exist with government directly. It also allows potentially a better experience or no experience, which ties into our next one here, which is that there is the possibility for less effort for the public to provide the public service with information or government, with information that is already recorded, say your and trustee. So for example, your financial information that's held by that bank or accounting provider, government needs to know about that for taxation purposes or statistics and things like that. But why should people go through the effort to supply that information directly when it exists in these other places that they have a trust relationship with who are motivated to be trustworthy by their position in private providing services to people and not to act maliciously. And using the APIs that we discussed before that information could be with the appropriate consent and identity and all of that stuff, be provided to government in an automated fashion as opposed to a laborious fashion at present. Next, the reverse of that, which is that government holds an enormous amount of information about people. It starts with things like passports and citizenship and goes out into a whole variety of other areas that we deliberately and rightly hold information about people, but that information could add value to them in other contexts. So in New Zealand and a lot of other places, we have, for example, money laundering laws, which requires when you open a bank account, for example, that the bank gather and substantiate a whole bunch of information about you before they can give you service. And so the idea of government as a platform being present and a lot of that information being available, again, appropriate consent and security, via API and the trustworthiness of that being as sound as convenient because it came from government, allows a significant listening and effort and pain for both the intermediaries on that side and their customers who are, of course, ultimately the same people we're serving. Next, a couple of slightly less straightforward ones. So having more government data available via API and in appropriate real time allows the possibility for a great deal more public value and insight from government health information. And I came across a really nice example of this in Taiwan the other day. I wasn't in Taiwan, obviously, no one, none of us get traveled internationally right now, but Taiwan as a part of their COVID response mandated mask use and had, of course, to manage quite a bit of a supply chain around providing those masks or the mandatory use of them. And what Taiwan did lead by Audrey Tang, the quite famous digital minister, put a public API over the top of that fairly simple real time supply information about mask supply and location and opened up that API to civic hackers in Taiwan, positively minded people who then provided to the procedure to build 140 odd applications over the top of that information, providing the ability for the public there to respond accordingly to where the masks were and the disposition of them, thereby reducing panic buying and wasted effort on trying to find masks where they were moving them to where they were. Next up is the concept of rules which we've touched on a few times already in this talk. And this one is big enough so that it could probably necessitate its own talk, but we'll touch on it now. So governments create or course create policy and regulation which a good portion of that policy and regulation is relatively deterministic rules. An example for you is in New Zealand, we have the holidays act which sets out people's entitlements for annual leave from work and was made some time ago and has been, how do I put this, diplomatically, widely regarded as borderline and unmanageable because it is ambiguous and subject to interpretation. So if we had a public API which contained the calculation parts of the holidays act and that API was used by things like payroll systems and HR systems in organizations, government and not government, then that interpretation that is needed to be done every time a text law is turned into computer code does not need to be done anymore. So there's a fairly obvious benefit in efficiency there so in terms of effort not needing to be spent that quote code of course can also be produced as open source code and just as an API. But the real benefit is in the unambiguous and testable interpretation of those rules which affect all of our working lines. So testing means being able to model and statistically model using data and the development of those regulations and iteration of those regulations and provides certainty to the regulator, to the people writing and expressing the rules that the deterministic parts of what they're putting out there are going to be interpreted as intended, meaning that unintended consequences should be dropped but not removed entirely of course and better results should be achieved from that kind of rules. Now that doesn't mean that policy legislation becomes only if then else statements. It means that there is room in these concepts for the human discretion that exists in a great deal of legislation and regulation already and that is very possible to implement in that and we have a number of people around the world who are pretty active and interested in moving on this. So there's a lot of things that putting APIs up that represent our data rules, transactions and content provides. There are some bonuses which are outside the direct influence of this. So as I'm sure many of you are aware, APIs are quite a good idea just in software architecture anyway because they enable us to chop our functionality into smaller bits. We also don't love the pace that ICT moves in government and it's fair to say that at least in New Zealand and in many places of the world that there are not nearly enough APIs around. So if we put up APIs in order to facilitate government of the platform, we should also be able to accelerate the pace of change in government ICT which would mean that because of the importance of that in modern governing and serving the public that we should be able to be considerably more responsive to people's needs, particularly with regards to timeliness of change. Secondly, there is a slightly dystopian possibility of this, of the general digitizing of government which that leaves interaction purely between people and a computer, whether that computer is, whether that experience is provided by government or via internet media. But that's actually not fundamentally necessary in this because using government as a platform and smart code and automation over the top of those APIs, particularly the law firms, we can give people the ability to help each other whether in a professional capability as public servants and an NGO capability like and the citizens advice bureau in New Zealand which there are likely to be analogs of in other countries or directly helping each other such as the stereotypical anti-helping someone or my son will do that or whatever it might be. And the reason for that is that smart automation and information where it can help to help those people to wield the full benefit of government on behalf of other people, rather than just what they know from a particular silo. And things like that. So it's that ability to broaden the reach of our entitlement and benefit. Thirdly, as I'm sure you all have come across, innovation often isn't particularly easy in a government context or any government context. And one of the ingredients to that is that in order to innovate right now, we seem to need to get permission from every single stakeholder involved in every single piece of innovation across silos and across different cultures and across organizations. And so if we have big parts of what we do, available machine readable via API, that means that innovation can be performed without necessarily requiring the direct permission of conservative voices who actually hold the API because of the basic arms link nature of that relationship. That of course doesn't mean that regulation for ethical purposes and things like that isn't required, which takes me into my final slide. So this has gone a little bit faster than I had anticipated. But that leaves more time for questions or for other needs. So the headwinds for this, the things that the whole aspect include that right now in New Zealand and in many jurisdictions, governments and public services are used to providing the entire continuum of an experience designed to meet the intent of a policy themselves. And there's not an enormous amount of trust required in that for most digital experiences. That trust does exist in the contracting out of services intended to meet the policy intent in many, many areas, particularly social but also in business. So that's all of the NGOs and things like that who provide health services or Citizens Advice Bureau as I mentioned before, people like that. But there is the extension of that trust model and without the same movement of money, the contractual thing that exists with those NGOs into the digital space, into the provision of digital service. Secondly, what that means is that those people are no longer entirely accountable for that. And of course, from new public management in the 1980s, accountability has been a very key thing in Western democracy, Western public services, which means that we've been very, very concerned about being accountable and having control in order to supply that accountability. Which means that as an exacerbation of what we see and creating APIs in the platform economy, which is that ultimately, putting one up and out, there is an act of faith that if you build it, they will come and they will use it. That we also need to have faith and act appropriately in order to prevent that idea of accountability from killing the golden goose, as it were. So that was my last slide. There's a nice black screen there. So I'm gonna put that away for a second. So thank you all for listening to that. And I hope it was interesting. I know it's not directly related to Drupal, but of course APIs are related to Drupal, the idea of putting government information out by content, very relevant to Drupal. And hopefully it's professionally aspirational for all of us as government professionals and suppliers to government. So I'm really happy to take questions for the discussion forum. I see there are quite a few, I don't know, most of that is yes, I can hear you. Well, gosh, I was in presenter mode. That's fine. Hi, Lee, I've just jumped in to help you out. Yes, thank you for that. And we did sort out the presentations on the way there. So I'll just have a quick look at the questions that are coming through. I think we can hear. Yeah, we can hear the slides. Just here. So if we can, I think we've got the Q&A live session going at the moment. So if anyone has any questions, please post that there and we'll try and answer those as they're coming through. Apologies earlier for the video. I'll try and rerun that at the end of this session. We've got a bit of time and I'll play the intro again. Hopefully it would sound this time. Because there's anyone. I've got to really, I'm very animal. That's right. So does anyone have any questions, Lee? I mean, Lee, that was great. Thank you for your time. It was really interesting. I just want to respond to Jonathan there. Thanks for your comment. I was directly involved in that work, the Zepfs Innovation Lab and the Royal's Code. So that's part of where my interest and involvement comes from. In fact, I was at the very first meeting that set up that lab. Just trying to see these questions. Yeah, I hope my couch was appropriately seen there. Yes, very much. Okay. Yes, and I'll reassure everyone that I am wearing pants. That's not true. Okay. I can't see any specific questions at the moment. So... Quite a lot of information packed in there. And it's a pretty broad and dense subject. Just having a quick look at the Q&A. I think that might be it. I'm just checking the quick discussion forums for anything. Great, thanks. Okay, I think there's some questions about sharing the slides. It will let you know how if you can get those slides shared. What I might do now, I've got a few minutes left. I might just play the intro. But thank you, Lee. Thank you for your time. And yes, if anyone has any questions, they can contact Lee in the Meeting Hub. If Lee's open to being connected to. There's ways that you can obviously connect to any of the speakers today during the Meeting Hub and during the event. So thank you, Lee. And let's have a quick look, apparently, some Q&A recent. Just recent. Please share the slides. Yes. Okay, there is a couple of questions there. I can see there. So, Lee, if you go to the Q&A at the bottom and just click on your starred ones. Yeah, I'm on the mic. Oh, yes, my star ones. How is the government dealing with this if you're dealing with a lot of related issues? That is a enormous question. I presume that's regarding APIs and government as a platform. The... So, one of the perks of using REST web APIs and things like that is a lot of the security challenges are quite well understood in terms of how to have intermediaries use them, how to farm them up there. We understand very well how to, collectively, how to secure them. HTTPS and HTTPS and all of those things. I don't quite understand the question about comply with the latest tech issues, but this is like running any other piece of tech as that it requires effort and focus. And that effort and focus needs to continue into the future. So, a broad answer for a broad question. Nathan's question, what's the biggest barrier I've seen and heard when describing gap to policy markets? So, it's really not the easiest thing to actually get people to understand the implications of APIs themselves of machine-readable work. And so, I think that it requires a basic view of the world, which includes that in order to sort of naturally get that. So, I think that's probably the biggest one in explaining it and describing it. I think the second thing I want to probably repeat is around the expectation that maybe they can't control the entire continuum of this. And there's a certain amount of trust in there. Hello, what's the single most important argument against increasing income and agencies exposed to date? So, single most important argument, that's the thing is that there's actually, this is a thing to do which actually has many benefits and not all that many downsides because it is not the most expensive thing in the world to create APIs to create APIs which are functional and especially considering the amount of money that governments typically spend on IT. I think that depends on which debt column you're talking to, Kim. So, if you've got some examples, so a policymaker is going to have really, really different imperatives to an IT leader or a chief executive or a minister or, you know, so it really depends on getting the appropriate concept for the appropriate person. I've covered some of them in this presentation. There are other benefits, of course. So, as a shorthand, probably your IT stakeholder is going to be more interested in the actual interoperability and reuse and ability to move faster with it. So, Jonathan, now that it says innovation lab, who's doing rules code in the New Zealand government? So, there is a unit in the New Zealand government called Better for Business which is doing that. They're hosted out of our Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and I can supply personal contacts to anybody who's interested in that directly. I think it's also worth mentioning that there's a pretty substantial international community. You can find them on places like Twitter. And say, for example, Hannah Schwarz and Nadia Webster, for example, who were associated with the Service Innovation Lab are still working in this space, notably with Wellington City Council, they're at the local government unit. Morad, hello. How to reduce risk of integrated services being used by determined hackers for unlawful purposes? So, an integrated service is simply a website or an app or that provides services in the way that they are provided now electronically, but it doesn't restrict itself to a single organisation or silo. So, I don't necessarily see that it's particularly more vulnerable to hacking than any other, particularly because there's no fundamental need for it to hold information, identity information or otherwise, because that information should be able to be sourced from the customer or sourced from APIs on the fly at the time, and there's no physical need for it to hold. So, if there's a, I can expand on that with you, but I'm not sure that it increases our expo, it needs to increase our exposure, that sort of thing any more than the existing web services, and perhaps it could reduce that because of that, then there's not particularly necessarily anything but transient information. So, back up to the top, we've got one minute and nine seconds. So, let's, is there a central government source for all government APIs? We'll just look and give an individual government website. So, I presume you're talking about New Zealand sign-up. We have a web page on digital.gov.nz, which provides pointers to the API storefronts or platforms and things like that. There are, of course, not as many APIs as I personally would like there to be at present, but we are moving in our own way there. And last question for 37 seconds. The biggest part of the implementation of the APIs, coordinate loads of government to provide the required data or the utilization of the APIs that you're having in mind. I think it's, to be honest, in my experience, it's been the interesting people who commission work and actually including APIs in that work. So, getting over the initial hump of getting them created in the first place. It would be nice to be starting with coordination rather than creation, and that's me.