 Thank you. It's been a very emotional start to the day, hasn't it? I just want to start by saying thank you so much for having me here. I am a foreigner in this land. I was greatly privileged to be invited to do some work with Department of Internal Affairs around open data initially and then looking at service integration and a huge thank you to my boss Daryl Carpenter for actually extending the invitation to come here and work on making sure it happened, on doing great things. But I am a foreigner to the land. I have brought my family here because I believe New Zealand is positioned probably the best in the world to actually do something quite systemically different, to actually drive a fundamental change not just for New Zealand and New Zealanders, but to actually set a new baseline around the world, around how government can be an enabler society, but also how the society can actually work better for the benefit of everyone. And I'll just also quickly touch on, particularly after such an emotional start this morning. I feel so welcome, humbled and privileged to be here in Aotearoa and to be here in this conference and part of this morning's mahi and to be invited to settle. As an Australian coming to New Zealand it has been so uniquely special to come to a bicultural nation that, you know, it really has got it so very right compared to so many other countries. So thank you for that example for the world. Now, I'll jump into the slightly less interesting things in some ways. I am interested in exploring the future. I believe we are at a pretty critical tipping point right now and we actually run a significant risk of potentially reinventing the past with shiny new things because seeing a new thing, seeing something that's shiny is fun and we are nothing if not driven by shiny as creatures. But if we don't take a moment to sit back and look at the system, at the systemic change that we're looking for, if we don't take a minute to explore what is the future we're walking towards or running towards, then we end up actually iterating away from pain and not towards a vision. And iterating away from pain quite often means that you actually reinforce the status quo as it stands today. So I'll jump into that in a little bit details but I think that, and I have always believed for the last 10 years when I used to be working for Australia's Minister Claire Gurran, a Minister at the time, Kate Lundy. We were involved in a lot of the early Gov2O work and Senator Lundy was a massive advocate and supporter of the Glam sector and we spent a lot of time actually looking at the role of Glam's in society and I've always been a believer since then of that role and I think with all the exciting opportunities that we're seeing around new technology, around new distribution of power as we're seeing with citizens, which I'll go into in a moment, we're also seeing simultaneously a growing gap, a growing gap in equality, in access, in knowledge, in wealth. So I would argue that Glam's are more important than ever as one of our means as the Minister mentioned in distributing the wealth of not just knowledge and culture but even potentially goods and I'll get into that a little bit later. So the role of Glam's and a lot of other institutions as well but the role of Glam's is probably more important than ever. So let's jump into the future. I like to remind people that we invented all of this. I think it's important to remember that because it's too easy sometimes to say well here's the system as it is and how do I work within that. We invented all of it, we invented these systems, we invented government, we invented international arrangements, we invented NDF, we invented Glam's. The reason this is important is because remembering that we can reinvent it is critical. It's critical because all of these things can feel very big and they can feel very difficult to change but they're just abstract creations that we built. So taking that moment to realise that we can rebuild them is an important part of the process of shifting from consumers to creators. Being a consumer, being of a normative mindset is a habit particularly of public institutions of which a lot of Glam's are and because we are taught when we come into public institutions well here's the system, here's how you work within the system, here's how you comply. Actually getting away from a compliance mentality towards a creative mentality and again I think the Glam sector has led this. Some of the early work that I saw in, there was a wonderful event in Australia about 10 years ago called, it was run by Wiki Media with the Glam sector, it was Glam Wiki. It really showed the innovation that's been happening in this space and the forward thinking and the community centred view of the Glam sector but I think that the public sector is a little bit of catching up to do actually with you guys. So remembering we can reinvent shifting from consumer to creator is pretty critical and in the process of doing so we need to think about what we can leave behind. One of my favourite stories is a couple of monks are walking along a river. Let's call them a couple of female monks for the sake of it. I actually am, I study Shaolin Kung Fu of which Chan Buddhism is a part and that's, you know, we have female monks and they're walking along a river and they've taken a vow of silence in this particular sect and they get to the edge of the river and there's a person at the other side saying, I've broken my leg and I'm running away from bandits, please, please, hello, can you help me? And one of the monks yells out and says, don't worry, I'll come and get you and help them over the river and they keep going. So the two monks are continuing on the way after helping this person escape and the younger monk says to the older monk, senior monk, we kind of broke our vow back there a couple of hours back with that person at the river. You know, are we allowed to do that? And the other monk says, well, I put that person down back at the river, why haven't you? Thinking about what we can put down rather than just carry, continue to carry with us is important. This is the new correct map of the flat surface stationary earth. It was true. It was universally known that the world was flat. It was universally known. All of the assumptions and all of the policies of the day as such as they were were based around that assumption. At some point, it became known that it was untrue. And as we know, it created a lot of consternation at the time. But it we had to then shift our thinking. There are things that we currently know to be true that will be shown to be untrue. There are things that we currently know to be untrue, but we haven't shifted our thinking yet. So we need to take that moment to think about what do we want to take with us and what don't we want to take with us. Otherwise, we end up taking those assumptions into the future. I'll talk about paradigm shifts in a moment, but we end up subconsciously bringing certain biases into, into our planning, into our programs, into our services, into our policies, into our laws that may be things of the past and things of the past paradigm that are not relevant anymore. So we need to be mindful of that. So skills, and I'll talk a little bit about skills. Skills aren't just about digital skills. Skills are about self awareness, about critical thought, about understandings, you know, unconscious bias and how we choose to create the sort of environments that we want to. There's been a huge movement in the tech sector around trying to get more inclusiveness in the development of new technologies. You're only as free as the tools you use, you're only as free as the skills you have. If your developer team is all one particular demographic, which has been the case for a lot of companies, you end up building really non inclusive technologies, unintentionally, not, you know, very rarely are those people actively trying to exclude people, but by not having that diversity of, of different aspects of our, of our demographics of culture, of language, you end up just subconsciously building things that are exclusive. So creating diversity right at the beginning, right at the design phase, right through the implementation phases is a critical part of this moving forward. And that helps us mitigate some of those subconscious biases, but it still doesn't go quite far enough. Distributed power is something I think that's worth noting as well. A lot of us, you know, we just live, we are, we are in the present and we've got this, this wonderful sort of assumption that the present is the present and not actually history in the making. But right now, I contend that we are in a period where individual people are more individually powerful than ever in the history of our species. When we were hunters and gatherers, well back, you know, individuals were relatively self-reliant, but it didn't scale. We moved into cities and naturally had to create a massive specialisation of different things in order, and which created an interdependency within the society in order to, in order to scale. But at the same time, individuals got less and less empowered because the power went further and further up the top into the means of production, into the means of control, into the means of access. But what the internet did, and it started with the independence movements, you know, several hundred years before, people both have a psychology of I am an individual, I have rights, which started with independence movements, but they also have the tools of implementing that assumption now with the internet and with technology and yes, only a third of the world's population is online, but that's growing every day and it's enormously up from where it was. Where's it two thirds now? It's enormously up from where it was. But so they have both the perspective of power and rights and the ability to route around damage, so to speak, and they have the tools at their disposal. So we've moved from kings and castles to being nodes in the network. And if traditional institutions, and of course I tend to work in government a lot at the moment, but whether it's government or any other form of traditional institution, if we don't start acting as a node in the network, which is both relies upon and is relied upon for the benefit of the system in which we operate, we actually render ourselves less relevant and we actually become the damage that people will actually route around. I'll give you a quick direct example. Well, it's a slightly indirect example, but I'll give you a quick example. In Australia, when I was working for the senator, there was this fabulous project to take the Magna Carta. So we have a copy of the Magna Carta in Australia, which is one of the best preserved copies of the Magna Carta in the world, which is lovely and it sits in our Parliament House in Canberra. So there was this project to digitize it. Now, in different countries, there were different processes around digitizing and the copyright that comes on top of that. In Australia, in the US, the practice is the process of digitizing something doesn't add new copyright. So one would argue the Magna Carta is somewhat out of copyright. But the process in Australia at that time was, well, we're going to digitize the Magna Carta, we're going to add new crown copyright on it. So we knew about this digitization project. We asked for a copy of it to put online, specifically under a credit commons by attribution license, specifically to make it an authoritative source of one of the best preserved copies of the Magna Carta in the world. And we got into this somewhat interesting conversation with the people who were the curators of that artifact because they sort of said, well, we can give you a high resolution copy under crown copyright license, full rights reserved, or we can give you a low resolution copy under by attribution creative commons license. And we were just saying, why? And they were saying, because it's the Magna Carta. And we said, but it's the Magna Carta. And it was this real epiphany for me of they genuinely thought that their job was to protect this, you know, this artifact in digital form from being abused, misrepresented, defaced, all these kinds of things. Whereas, and we just came from a different cultural assumption that from our perspective, having it openly available would turn it into the authoritative source, would turn it into like right now, the copy of the Magna Carta on Wikipedia is, you know, from someone's phone. And that's not a good representation of that cultural artifact. It's a really important cultural artifact. So it really got into this conversation as I found out later, it created a couple of years of consternation within that agency. And they did actually come around to being a little bit more open to open access. But why? As a species who has thrived because of our capacity to share, our capacity to cumulatively learn over time, why are we locking away our most precious cultural attributes, artifacts, our most precious knowledge artifacts? Why are we locking away the things that make us most effective at evolving and then blame people for not being educated and informed? It's a very interesting question. Anyway, so distributed power is important. And what role do we have as, in terms of government, there's a whole bunch of stuff government does, but also in the glam sector, in enabling our society to be a more effect, and individuals within that society, to be more effective nodes in their own network. So which way is forward? I think that there is an interesting question here about where are we trying to move towards and what we want to take with us. The 21st century sees many communities emerging as hyper-connected, transnational communities that are bound not necessarily by the geopolitical conditions of the past. It's not just me in my town anymore. It's me in my community of interest, which is transnational in nature. Our geopolitical entities are, you know, are somewhat struggling with that, but I contend there's always a role for the ability to scale how we deal with, you know, garbage and education and public services, and all the things that make physically living somewhere really important, and culture for that matter. But we also need to identify how do we actually protect and enable people's transnational identity that's not bound and limited by a geopolitical construct. And there's a real question there, because right now people are just creating communities, but their rights within those communities and their interest outside of geopolitical context is not necessarily as readily being represented. So there's some interesting challenges there. So which way is forward and what sort of future do we want to move towards? And how many ideas that have been shaped throughout our long history precede these new characteristics of the paradigm shift I'm just about to go through. So I suggest that some of the assumptions that we have might be a bit like a rusty anchor. They kind of gave us stability and high tide, but they might be dragging us towards a reef at the moment and we need to figure out what to let go. So there's a lot of pressures that we're dealing with. I'm only going to flick through these kind of quickly, but it's important to note that there is a lot of change being driven by pressure. Pressures of changing user needs or citizen needs or people needs. What do people actually expect a need from our institutions is changing. That's a pressure. Pressure of budgets, pressure of how people respond to the new environment, pressure of increasingly competitive and internationally competitive environment they will work within. But pressure is a good thing I think that and embracing that it is a little uncomfortable is probably the first stage to engaging with discomfort in a in a in a constructive way. I've seen if we start looking at sort of if we look at service design there's been a lot of take up of service design processes in government which has been wonderful and through the glams as well. But quite often the service design team will clash with the IT team. And the IT team and my background is more in the technology side of things. They've been beleaguered for a long time. They've sort of been told to do more with less for a long time. They've become battled you know battle weary of saying no. And so become known as the no people so everyone's routing around them which is also not ideal. But understanding that there is a tension between service design and technical, genuine technical excellence and it's when you actually embrace that discomfort and find the magical spot where that actually brings those two disciplines together as well as lots of other disciplines but it's in discomfort that we can actually explore genuinely new ways. If you're entirely comfortable with what you're doing either you are an extraordinary set of individuals and that's very lucky for you. Or more likely you're probably not challenging yourself quite enough. You're probably not really right exploring the bleeding edge and we need to both do business as usual and be simultaneously exploring the bleeding edge of how to improve how we do main operational work. So pressure is good but uncomfortable and discomfort should be something we embrace. Who can you trust of course? We have this emerging fake news issue which isn't really all that new. It's been around for a long time. It's just been called out a little bit better. And again our public institutions not just public institutions but our broader glam sector I think has an important role to play here as people who are not coming with a particular agenda but are actually there to be custodians of things, of truth, of stories, of a trusted partner or a trusted source of information that people can go to amidst all of the stuff that is being thrown at them from highly personalised and echo chamber sort of content hitting us on the internet every day. Our public institutions I believe are the most systemically motivated to be a source of support for society. So I think there's an important role there for us all. And I think the biggest challenge though, I hope you burned this particular one in your retinas, this is something that I started really thinking about a little while ago and it's opening up a lot of interesting conversations in governments around the world. The recognition is that as I mentioned before this increasing complexity of our lives, you're not just subject to local laws and local needs, you are subject to international needs, international laws, you're subject to every small change in the system actually has an exponential impact on the complexity of your life. So trying to ask someone to interface with every aspect of that part of their life is hard and increasingly difficult. If we were to embrace the idea that the green, I'm very sorry it's green and red, it was a terrible design issue so I'll fix that when I next do the slides. But there's a green line that sort of goes dramatically up. I believe that we're seeing an exponential growth in complexity. Complexity of society, complexity of people's needs. And yet government is not actually built to be exponential in response and I would suggest a lot of the GLAMs are in the same position. So rather than trying to be everything to everyone, we actually need to come up with new models. There's what I like to call a needs gap emerging and it's an exponential needs gap of what people need versus what we individually can actually deliver. So the opportunity here is what we can collectively deliver. If we actually see ourselves as a node in the network, as a component that other people can build upon, rather than trying to be everything ourselves for everyone, then we have the opportunity to enable the system to respond to the system, not just try to be the single interface. I'll come back to this one a little bit later but this problem of complexity is I think one of our biggest challenges moving forward because it's not going to go down, it's not going to get simpler and we're not going to get funding or support to become exponential response units. We need to figure out how to actually enable an exponential response which requires a different way. So let's talk about paradigm shifts. The first, the reason thinking about paradigm shifts is important is because there's a lot, if you don't recognize the shift in how things work, then again you too quickly build for the past. So the first one is central to distributed. A lot of you will be entirely comfortable with this naturally but some may not. And you still see, even though you talk about central distributed, even though everyone knows that there's an entire world out there of people doing services, most business problems you have, someone else probably has, rather than starting your work from a, he's the much money I have, so how much of the problem that I can do, can I solve with this money? You could start from the, well who else has this problem? Who's a natural ally and who's a natural partner in this, what else can I build upon? It's quite a different approach. And it also starts to lead to people starting to think about, well rather than I want to do something, so I'm going to build something and everyone can come to me. And that might be a website, it might be a service, it might be a consultation, it might be a policy collaboration. Every time we build something and then expect people to come to it, we are not embracing the distributed paradigm. If the people that we want to engage with are out there, why aren't we building in a way that actually supports those? I want to do a quick call out for Citizen Advice Bureau, which of course is based in a lot of the libraries around the country. That partnership between libraries as a really important resource and service and Citizen Advice Bureau as a service for people to help them in their lives is a really good example where they are meeting need that is not necessarily being directly met by government in a lot of cases, but not just government, the complex system of people trying to navigate their lives, which is naturally cross-sector and cross-organization. What if we actually provided to libraries and Citizen Advice Bureau and to those kinds of natural service intermediaries the things that they need? Here are the business rules for what entitlements you are relevant to you. Here's the services register or all the services government provides in a way that you can easily consume and present to your clients. Here's the information and not just more and more PDFs of course, like when talking about digital government as an enabler, not just as a digital service, but mechanisms that can support the scalability of how those services are provided by those intermediaries. If you can say enable those nodes where they are to do what they do better, the whole system has an uplift, the whole system is able to respond to that complexity. If again we start to say, I mean I'll give a simple example of consultation. If you want to do a consultation with anglers, right, and my husband is a mad fisherman as a few of you may have seen on my social medias, which has been great, I've been taught to fly fish, it's just another weapon, so it's been good fun to learn. But trying to do a consultation with the angling community is a fascinating feat because it is a very diverse community of people and they're, you know, from every walk of life. So if you wanted to do a consultation around fishing, then, you know, there's this conversation around rather than build a website and they'll come to the website, where are they? You know, if you specifically want to ask people about their thoughts in a particular area, you know, the right way of going about it might be to go and actually put up a poster at that particular fishing hole, you know, for three months because that's when you know during the peak season because that's when you know everyone's going to be there. So this acting as a node and moving from a central to distributed model isn't just about recognizing, you know, that's how the internet works and that's how society now is increasingly working, but about integrating it into our business processes and into how we think and how we operate and how we plan and how we schedule and resource what we do to actually support that distributed approach. OK, so as an extension of that, of course, local to globalize, I've sort of spoken a bit about as next the next paradigm I want to talk about is analog to digital. I was talking the same as the minister at NetHui a couple of weeks ago last week. Gosh, it's going really slow the about analog to digital and about how we I sort of like to joke that we use lawyers as modems. We sort of keep building these analog things like laws, like legislation, like policies, like documents, like how tos. And then we're asking people to take on the cognitive load of interpreting and integrating those rules into their work, whether it's into their business systems, into their processes, into their help desk. So digital that so open that isn't digital doesn't scale and digital that isn't open doesn't last in my experience. And so trying to shift people from an analog to digital process isn't just about smartphones. In fact, it's not about smartphones at all. If you take an analog process and digitize it, you're probably doing it wrong. The goal here and the opportunity here is to step back and say, what's the point? What's the policy intent? What's the goal that you have? And actually, how do you help people reach that goal? How do you measure that goal from the start? In government, we have, you know, policy intent, legislative framework, and then the enormous operations of government from grants to services. And quite often, we can't map those things back to the original policy intent. So how do you measure whether you're meeting that policy intent? So this is paradigm shift, not just from slow to fast, but from analog to digital. And it's a whole different way of thinking, not just digitization of an analog process, but I don't need to know how much you earn to be able to see whether you meet the means test for this service. If it's just a means test, why couldn't I say, are you happy for me to check with another agency with your permission and with your visibility and transparency that you meet the means test? That way I'm not having to then store personal private information about you at all. I'm literally just checking whether you meet the means test rather than copying and pasting stuff all around government, which is the traditional approach. Why aren't we taking just leapfrogging all of that and saying, what do we actually need to do the service and how do we put customer control at the center of that? So from your perspective, of course, you will always have analog artifacts and being the curators of those is a really important role. But then how do we give people a digital experience of those, not because it's fun to do digital, but to scale because you can only get so many people physically in the doors and I know a number of you have already taken this leap into like in a big way into the realization that digital access creates digital inclusion, creates inclusion beyond digital because and then again, we need to start looking at services that are not just web-first, but looking at other sorts of services. I won't jump into that one straight away. Anyway, analog to digital, paradigm two, paradigm three, scarcity to surplus. And part of that is closed open. We keep building models based on the assumption of scarcity. Now, the first one I'm going to talk about is a little controversial, is copyright. Copyright was about controlling the means of production because the means production was expensive and you wanted to create a mechanism by which people could get a be incentivized financially to invest in production. Totally makes sense in 18th century. Means of production now is very cheap. Means of distribution is very cheap. The fact that the power to create has been massively distributed. Anyone has the power to create now. Thank you, YouTube to a degree. Anyone has the power to distribute. Anyone has the power to monitor. Anyone has the power to enforce. And it's not about liking or disliking these things. It's just reality as it is today. So embracing and understanding that is really critical. So where's the opportunity in scarcity to surplus gets where it gets interesting? I think one of my little predictions is that in the short term we're going to see nanotech combined with 3D printing to say, well, if I can deconstruct and reconstruct molecular material and then print food or products or chairs or whatever, then that and again, our glams could be a really important point of distribution of that because not everyone's going to have a 3D printer in their home. Then that creates a really interesting opportunity to actually embrace the surplus paradigm and address some aspects of poverty, some aspects of hunger and be able to support people better. And yet one of the biggest encumbrances to 3D printing as an emerging and in many cases a well-established field is of course how we think about copyright because it is freaking some people out that you could make an identical copy of something potentially. So at what point are we going to say do we want to protect the business models of the 17th, 18th, 19th century? Or do we want to embrace business models of the 21st century and support the 21st century sort of community and society? Close to open is a part of that as well. Security through obscurity was the past. Security through openness is actually the future and indeed the present because as we say in the open source community many eyes make all bugs shallow. If you actually have your systems and your processes and your code open you've got a better chance of identifying a problem and mitigating it very quickly. Whereas keeping things closed means that the entire ownership is on you and what resources you have at your disposal to actually identify and mitigate those issues as they rise. Okay, so skessey to surplus. Parodyne 4 I'll only quickly talk about this one is normative to formative from compliant to creative. We've had the idea of normal beamed into our houses by radio and television for a century now and it's become sort of normal to say what is normal and how do I comply to it? One of the greatest gifts of the internet as weird as it has been is to demonstrate there's no such thing as normal. It's a joyous thing and even though we are going through some serious pain points in dealing with that and with the idea that a person might have done something stupid and still be employable, you know, we are starting to realize that normal was never a thing and actually it's embracing our diversity. It's embracing our difference that makes us more powerful and more effective and more sustainable as a species. So trying to shift us away from normative and a compliance culture we're pretty good at compliance culture in government and it's fascinating to observe as a person who came from outside of government into government and again this doesn't apply to all GLAMs but it applies to a few. You sort of come in and it's like well here's the system and here's how you do it. When I started my first government job I automated 70% of my job in the first two weeks specifically so I could start to run data cover you. Okay, done. Can I have that new product please? And to be fair they kind of knew it was coming but I was motivated to do that and it kind of freaked a few people around me out a little bit but I had a creative impetus and incentive to actually look at how I could dramatically improve that. If everyone brought a formative view to their work then we would actually see a lot more innovation not just in innovation teams over there somewhere but across the board. We would actually move from a single core to a multi core processing system in each of our organizations. And the reason this is interesting is because everyone is capable of formative thought even if you've been taught in some case of decades to be entirely normative in your job, in your agency, in your organization you ask someone about their personal life about their family about their hobbies and that you can see them shift you can see them shift headspaces into a formative view because we're all capable of formative thinking and formative work of course and yet a lot of us has had beaten out of us in our work. So trying to bring that and of course bringing a formative view to work also brings a bit of risk it's a little bit scary for some up the chain sometimes again I'm in a fairly unique and lovely position to be supported to be entirely formative but if we can actually embrace formative thinking as an as an integral and important part of our culture moving forward perhaps we can actually unleash innovation right across the board. So a couple of couple of predictions for you just for fun. The last one will scare you that's fine. So I spoke about 3D printing. How many people are aware of what's happening with rockets now with rocket travel? Only a few. So for the rest of you normalization of rockets as a way of traversing the world is underway right now within the next five to ten years they reckon you know if you want to go to England you'll go there via rocket not via plane because you go up in the atmosphere for half an hour around the world in an hour and down in half an hour you could go over there work and be home in time for tea. That's going to be transformative you know in the same way that the planes and travel as we know it today was a huge disruptor to the world as it was that's going to take things to a whole new level. How many people remember Total Recall? Yay! So that's Johnny the self-driving cab from Total Recall. Yeah, this idea has been around for a long time but we're seeing it really happen. Interesting fact for you one of the designs they've had to put in place is the ability for windows to automatically tint when you go through a intersection with self-driving cars because our natural incentive to or our natural survival imperative kind of gets in the way when you're crossing a car like this so we're actually having to effectively hack against our own survival instinct right now which is fascinating. So what's interesting there isn't just a self-driving car but the fact that we are having to work around, route around our own biological impetus right now which is fascinating. Automation of course don't be tricked into believing that the you know the world's going to win because of automation. We've been through a number of massive automation events during our history industrialization one of them but there's been a few. So the opportunity here isn't just to say well how is automation how could we use automation you know to create different sorts of jobs. I reckon we need to actually start thinking about our hours in a different way rather than seeing our hours as the scarcity thing that I sell X number of hours in order to make some money during the week. We're almost seeing that you know why wouldn't we aim for a world where we work two or three days a week maybe do a day of paid civil service a week and then actually have a three or four day weekend and spend more time doing education doing art doing culture doing well pretty much anything we want and actually we could usher in a new renaissance world. Again we need to think about the sort of world we want. If we continue to embrace and hold tight to our chest the idea that a 50 hour working week is the the measure of value if we continue to think that the number of hours rather than the quality of of outputs of our work is our value then we're kind of missing a huge opportunity here and finally transhumanism. Um, so so I had a a new woman who I met a couple of times she was a very very interesting woman who was experimenting with body hacking anyone heard the term body hacking? Cool for anyone else this is not hacking in the breaking system sense this is the original terms of hacking which is about using technology and creative clever ways to make the world better. Right, so hacking is a good term I know the media doesn't like it but that's fine. So body hacking is about how can we actually embrace and extend ourselves somewhat? She took a tiny little sphere that was full with mercury and a free floating magnet put it into her finger. What's the point of that? You say well magnet spin according to frequency what's interesting here is that over a fairly short period of time she could relatively accurately tell different frequencies. You know she could see something spinning up she could sorry feel something spinning up she could feel different wireless frequency in an environment. She it gave her a sixth sense so to speak. What's fascinating here isn't just that because that's a fairly small hack but the brain the human brain adapted to a genuinely foreign input. Okay. Let that sink in for a second. Our brains can adapt to a foreign input. There's a there's a hilarious cartoon for the nerds in the room Geeks in the Room called XKCD and there's a brilliant one where the the person going in for surgery says hey while you're taking the appendix out can you put this in? And the doctor says that's a USB socket and you realise that won't work right and he goes yeah that's fine that's just hardware I'll sort out the software later. It's so interestingly true. The concept that how we see ourselves as human for a long time for our entire past and even still now we have this weird normative idea about what it means to be human. If something happens to somehow lessen our humanness you lose a leg you lose anything that we see as being human there is this instinct to reform, to be whole. The funny thing is that actually our wholeness is possibly part of our inhibitor right? If I don't have legs why wouldn't I add four rockets? I if I want to be the world's best rock climber why wouldn't I add 10 tentacles? And yet it might take me a couple of years to figure them out but my brain might be able to adapt to the new input. Now that sounds really out there for some of you but I actually I challenge you to to think about again what do you want to take into the future and what do you want to leave behind? Some of our world's you know great world religions have a very set idea about what it means to be human some other religions really don't. So I think there's going to be an interesting as we start to get into more people experimenting with transhumanism and body hacking I think there's going to be an interesting culture class where people's idea of what it means to be human starts to be fundamentally challenged it already is when you think about a lot of how we engage with or disengage with disability people see having a disability of any sort as a problem. A friend of mine back home who's a Aspie a lot of people in the tech community have Aspergers or different forms of things and I remember him calling me up and saying oh my son's just been diagnosed as an Aspie and I went okay and how do you feel about that and he's like it's great he's going to be a sysadmin just like his dad. It's that kind of positive engagement with our difference that I think is where we need to get to rather than normative oh I'm somehow less than what is normal it's so stupid. So exploring what it means to be human I think is an important part of the journey we're going to take over the next 10 or 20 years in particular and I think there's some really really interesting opportunities there I predict that the Olympics has got boring already because beating the 100 meters has got tiny fractions of a second why wouldn't we be taking the leash off as a few people have already started to explore and saying what's the fastest you could do it at all so long as there's a human involved in some way shape or form let's do it with rockets let's do judo with cybernetics let's do because if nothing else again we are creatures of shiny and so why wouldn't we embrace that shininess and where the shiny goes the sponsorship dollars go and then it'll become the main event there you go so what's the role of government I think about government some of those public some glams of public institutions some are not so I'll go through these ideas just briefly with you as some concepts that I think apply to both regardless access and showing all abilities have individuals have the ability to thrive you can't thrive if you are struggling to survive this is a tried and true thing and yet we keep putting the most bureaucracy and the most pressure on the most vulnerable how do we actually create so the baseline quality of life is good and then everyone can thrive above that rather than the baseline quality of life if you assume no support structures being not great I'm sure a bunch of you would know John Rawls there was a theory of I guess a philosophical sort of philosopher who had the idea that if you want to design what you're trying to do to be inclusive of everyone you have to put the blindfold on you have to reimagine the world and actually build it as with the assumption that the person being affected is you user-centered design and service design has been a wonderful thing to see blooming and blossoming in a lot of our organizations I would argue that all it's done has created the system systematization of empathy and it's reintroduced empathy in a systemic way into how we do things and that's been a really powerful way of actually serving people's actual needs but how do we ensure we serve the needs of people today and don't leave anyone behind vision is important leadership is critical and we all have a role to play in not just doing what is easy or what is currently the highest pressure not just iterating based on the current most important need which we then do over and over and over again chase our tails and recreate the system as it is we need to think we need to actually project that vision of the future so that we can iterate towards something we need to get that balance right so there is a role for all of our organizations in supporting stability balance and predictability a person's physical needs might be taken care of but if they are fearful then they still aren't able to thrive so how do we actually help create that balance so that confident communities and confident individuals can thrive and I think that the idea of enshrining digital rights is in legislation is an excellent idea and I will certainly be contributing to that consultation skills and again you all have such an important role to play here but I do suggest that it's not just about tech, it's not just about culture it's not just about language it's also about those basic personal skills if you can teach a person to be self-aware and to have critical thinking those two things combined are amazing platform for a lot of other things having said that critical thinking without self-awareness is a loaded gun self-awareness without critical thinking it can be a little too navel-gazy so we need to have both and the roles that we can collectively play in trying to support those skills so that people can get what they need engagement, participatory democracy how do we co-design what we're doing and genuinely co-design as well a lot of co-design has actually been kind of dressed up consultations and thinking about and figuring out how we can work collaboratively is a really important challenge that I think we have I love Wellington and I love the coffee culture in Wellington but I was joking the other day that coffee culture doesn't scale it's lovely but it doesn't scale I don't think we actually have yet at our disposal the fully fleshed out means of genuine co-design and direct involvement in the decisions in our lives across the entire democracy democratic system so some of that would have to look at not just how we improve how we do things but how we actually create opportunities to participate for themselves how we actually enable people to be direct agents in their lives not just how we better support what we think they need we've been exploring the concept of user-centered design where I'm designing for you is still me designing for you and we've seen that in everything from culture to language to service delivery so how would I actually make it so that you have what you need outside of the context of what I think you need is an interesting question as an enabler and this goes back to what I was saying before I, particularly in government I think that we have a role of starting to see digital infrastructure as public infrastructure we don't do a cost recovery approach to every road we don't do a cost recovery approach to every school trying to see digital infrastructure as an enabler for the not just the economy but for the society for our nonprofits for people directly is I think a conversation that needs to be had and an idea that needs to be explored more than we currently have so thinking about that infrastructure that we build constantly thinking about it as being a node in that network and how other nodes could interface with it for their own purposes is a challenge and an opportunity for all of us in what we do so I did want to make some time for questions so embrace change enable trust, enable freedom enable people to thrive think about the future society that we want and I've got two diagrams here one is a cheeky one about the tipping point which is sort of talking about you push push push to challenge status quo and then hit the tipping point and then it's like oh we've got a centralizer we've got a major expectations we've got not overpromise oh it's unstoppable and people start to panic when you actually start to make progress which is itself I think quite interesting but the opportunity here is to to not panic but rather to let go and actually create that opportunity for everyone to build their own to move into an enabler node in a network kind of mentality so what role can you play and how do we all support that future and what is that future there's a bunch of work that we're doing in the Department of Internal Affairs around and it's a very small team in the service innovation lab just trying to challenge the status quo and look at different ways of doing things I encourage you all to go and check out our website but I'll draw your attention to just one of the little examples here the idea that if we could actually forget all the business rules of all the services and entitlements and legislation more broadly available digitally then you could start to mass those things up into services for people that could be delivered by citizen advice bureau by a library by a bank by various different agencies to be able to say well you don't need to have to log in to identify yourself to be able to say well I'm just going to answer a few questions and see what's relevant to me here are the services that are relevant to me here are the entitlements that are not relevant to me and why and just to enable people to make better choices in their own lives is a big part of the heart of it so we're looking at services and service design and delivery working with lots of agencies and councils and other organisations building some of those reusable components trying to build an evidence base around that and trying to be an enabler for everyone in the system to do things in a different way in an evidence based way I won't go into that too much more right now just a last word just very quickly I think now is the time if that's not come through then then please that's the one thing I want you to take away now is the time because without fundamentally addressing these issues of access to distribution of skills transformation of our institutions into this new world that embraces these new paradigms and assumptions then we actually missed this opportunity this opportunity right now which is once in a lifetime to actually create the sort of future that we want which means we need to imagine what sort of future that we want not just a better future not just a cheaper future not just a slightly less painful future but what is the actual future that we want how do we want to be living not just in our work but in our lives and then how do we move towards that because then we have the opportunity to collectively design that sort of future that we want not just with us not just with you not just in organisations but with the society that we serve so I might close up there I hope that's been useful and I'll take a few questions thank you I should also note that now that we're at the end my child was like a little one and a half year old and she was sick all night so I'm not quite on my game questions if I can throw, ask people to put their hand up when they go to ask questions I can see you is anyone no no hi if you say it I'll repeat it if you like if you say it I can repeat it absolutely this is all good for individuals and a lot of us who work in the glam sector are on a very similar page if not quite as advanced in our thinking but how can we actually get our organisations to change because we are still funded by government local or central we have to adhere to all of the rules that we need to we still have to do yearly business planning and all of these other things and we are accountable to particular legislation and rules that are put down to us every now and then and we try to change internally as much as we can but how can we actually do something more tangible I think there's many ways to do it I'll give you a couple that I think are working so the first one is how many of you are working in a publicly funded glam how many are not just for different hands so we're talking about a three quarters to a quarter okay cool so in so I've worked in government I have worked in private sector for political sector and now public sectors and one of the things I found in the public sector is first of all no one everyone assumes everything to take a long time and cost a lot of money so delivering fast, delivering cheap which is possible with you know cloud and other modern tools is kind of the first part of the shock and awe campaign because then you can show what's possible I remember being in an agency a while ago that we came up with a particular thing that we thought would be pretty great pitched it to someone up the chain and he sort of laughed or he sort of said oh how much money will that cost and I told him and he thought it would cost literally 30 times what I said and he said but how long will it take and I said well I've already got a prototype up and running and he was blown away and the reason was because he came from one of our larger central agencies in Australia that's used to spending stupid amount of time and money on just starting innovation is a costly thing that you pay someone to do right not something that you necessarily do yourself so part of it is by running fast trying things within the little scope that we can and then I kind of have three rules for success which is the first one is do something which itself has integrity at the heart because if it doesn't have integrity like technical integrity cultural integrity I guess for the case for a lot of you then you've lost already so don't compromise on the integrity of the thing as the first one which sometimes means a fight and you have to pick those battles but then the second thing is work in the open we try to work in the open as much as we can and sometimes there are limitations particularly around different parts of the election cycle but working in the open creates the opportunity for other people to check what you're doing and to give feedback and to help reinforce what is good not just what is possible it gives an opportunity to build a demand so to speak so working in the open actually helps people say this is what we want which then helps create the right environment for the organisation to say oh well if there's demand we should meet the demand so tapping into that and the other part of that is also about sharing the glory with as many partners as possible so you've got as many fingers in the pie not just for fingers in the pie but because you genuinely want lots and lots of people to reap the benefits of the work but I've been in situations where we've done a major new open data initiative in Australia at one point and one of the states that we were working with we were working with almost all the state and territory governments and a bunch of councils too but one of the states had a political environment that was the opposite of the one that we were working in so to speak and there was a tension there about who should announce first and we just said you announce first I won't tell anyone in my organisation but you announce first because that will actually create the right motivation for more people to get on and if it's seen as central government sometimes that's actually put off for all the other states where if it's a state announcing first all the other states will want to get on board and then the central can sort of get on board too so I think that part of that is about no wasted effort making sure that everything you do or as much as possible as you do because even fail is not a wasted effort doing something and showing that it's not needed calculating the amount of time and money that you've saved by now not proceeding because you've taken an agile approach using precedence, creating a community and you already have such a strong and amazing community in the glam sector here so being able to say well everyone loves to be the first to be second so let's find someone that's done something close to this and then say hey we're not the first and that sounds a bit cheeky but then we all use each other that way and there is an international community out there as well that we can tap into so we can all use each other to lever up and to sort of have the upward spiral towards things so I think there's a lot of ways to work in the periphery show what's good have such a strong evidence base evidence base is evidence I think is critical in the Australian government there's been a habit and a drive towards beige as I call it where people have moved away from I remember having a very senior public servant who did something amazing and I was saying why aren't you screaming this from the rooftops and he said because being successful is just as bad as failing and I was like oh so much behavior makes sense now right but I contend that unless you are screaming the success from the rooftops then you are just part of the beige which means you are equally up for the chop as everyone else so if you have something like first of all do something good if you are not doing something good change it but then in doing something good make sure that it is as evidence base and public as possible so that it actually has the support moving forward if that makes sense so it means taking some risks it means bringing people along for the ride but if you deliver good things then and people collectively including managers benefit from that then you can create a community of naturally motivated people to do things in a different way more specific stuff I can give later any other quick questions or other time we are out of time unless it is a very short one it is a very short question thank you so much