The Public-Purpose Tech Holiday Library '22
Emerging, bold, and thought-provoking ideas on public-purpose technology for an inspiring holiday season
Welcome to our second annual Public-Purpose Tech Holiday Library! If the buzz of StateUp’s team Slack with the latest books, articles, and podcasts on technology and innovation that addresses major public needs is any barometer, public-purpose tech (PPT) has flourished and matured in 2022. Here, we’ve collated some of the most exciting ideas to drive positive change that have emerged this year. Members of our team, client network, and broader community have found these pieces inspiring, or worked on them directly. We are particularly excited to feature work that draws on public policy, digital technologies, and behavioural science as combined levers to improve our infrastructure and built environment systems and public services - areas that have kept us busy this year.
Happy festive reading!
Theme 1: The Who, What, & Why of Public-Purpose Tech
Public-purpose tech and the emerging ideas around it
In a three-part series for tech.eu, Johannes Lenhard, StateUp Expert Affiliate and co-author of the recently published Better Venture) asks what is public-purpose technology, and why does it matter right now?
“Why does science matter for policymaking?” Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Advisor, asked in his keynote lecture at the Bennett Institute Annual Conference 2022. Tracing a variety of approaches that government can engage to make use of national science and technology capacity, Vallance argued that “departments need to work out how to use innovation which means specifically thinking about interaction with SMEs, with the companies that are doing innovative work that might help government.”
Universities are natural homes for the development of public-purpose technology - but they need to provide the enabling infrastructure, argues StateUp founder Tanya Filer in Times Higher Education. (paywall) Tanya discusses the ins and outs of PPT more broadly with EF founder and ARIA chair Matt Clifford on his podcast, Thoughts in Between.
Theme 2: International Collaboration
International Collaboration, the Next Digital Divide, and Risk Prevention
We need better data to comprehensively measure the maturity of a nation’s compute ecosystem, argue TBI’s Tom Westgarth and Melanie Garson. But with better measurement comes enormous political challenges, making international collaboration necessary to address the risks of compute divides.
The StateUp View: Chloe Chadwick, Expert Affiliate
The Power of Partnership in Open Government by Suzanne Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner and Alex Ingrams offers an interesting assessment of the role of transparency and international reforms in norms around government openness.
On Interweave.gov a newsletter launched this year to provide weekly round-ups and original thought pieces on Digital Government developments in Europe and Asia, this interview with the UN ITU's lead on GovStack Yolanda Martinez, turns from pragmatism to philosophy and back again in discussing digital government openness, international cooperation, and connecting the unconnected.
Bilateral Cooperation in Practice
In November 2021, the UK and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to work more closely together on areas including science and technology, presenting a major opportunity to strengthen the scientific relationship between both countries to support dynamic R&D systems, driving mutual sustainability and economic prosperity. Programmes to support Trade, Investment, Innovation, Science & Academic partnerships have already contributed to economic activity in the UK, including £1.2bn of Israeli FDI into the UK from 2014-2021, according to a new report by PwC.
To build on the track record of successful scientific collaboration to date, StateUp recently worked with the British Embassy Israel and FCDO Science & Innovation Network to identify opportunities and shape the infrastructure to catalyse outstanding, sustainable, and complementary research and innovation collaboration for years to come.
Theme 3. Policy, Technology, and Decision-making
The StateUp View: Eszter Czibor, Head of Research
The Voltage Effect by John A List (and brief summary): There is increasing recognition, both in policy and practice, of the importance of rigorously testing our ideas from an early stage – and rightfully so! But it is time that we paid the same attention to the process of scaling, to avoid the "voltage drop" that occurs when an idea, product or programme, despite working well on the small scale, fails to replicate when rolled out widely. This book provides an accessible summary of the science of scaling through countless practical examples and anecdotes, drawing from the life and work of one of the world's top behavioural economist.
Could (should) tech regulate tech? Technology writer and policy professional Oliver Marsh poses the question right here on The New PPT, while this briefing from TBI lays out the case for incorporating technology into rulemaking to make regulations machine-readable.
Do policymakers “get” tech? In European Tech Voices, Stripe’s public policy team find that only "a small minority of startups (12%) believe policymakers actually understand the realities of what they’re facing, with a perception that structures are largely designed for incumbents or established businesses (who also have more resources at their disposal)."
Online Reviews and Manipulation with Dr. Paolo Turrini, TWS Game Theory Podcast: Paolo Turrini, StateUp Expert Affiliate and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, works on mechanism design of social networks. In this podcast episode, he discusses why ratings are so important in online markets, how they are manipulated, and how clever game theoretic considerations can make them more trustworthy. From public procurement to regulation, the potential implications for government are wide-ranging. And if digital platforms increasingly hold “statelike dominance” over our lives, as Vili Lehdonvirta argues in Cloud Empires, it matters even more.
(in the interview, Paolo mentions spoof restaurant The Shed at Dulwich, which topped a TripAdvisor list despite being non-existent. You can check out their menu here.)
The Political Economy of the Metaverse | IFRI - Institut français des relations internationales by StateUp Advisor and author of Good Data, Sam Gilbert.
The metaverse is at the heart of the strategy of big tech companies like Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft - but it doesn't yet exist and will take decades to build. This briefing provides an accessible overview of what the metaverse really means, and the policy issues it raises
The StateUp View: Tanya Filer, Founder & CEO
From Elizabeth Holmes to FTX, it’s been far from clear this year that technology is always all about public purpose. For times of ethical unmooring, thorny policy gaps, and just those personal dilemmas that keep you up at night, turn to The Right Thing, by HKS professor Jeffrey Seglin to show you the way in business and in life.
Theme 4. Infrastructure, Built Environment, and Resilience
The built environment is responsible for almost 40% of carbon emissions globally, requiring rapid, highly scaleable forms of decarbonisation to meet 2030 and 2050 commitments. This will require a less risk averse approach to the uptake of technology (and process) innovation. From their massive, multi-trillion dollar collective procurement power to other policy instruments, governments around the world have an outsized role to play.
Avoiding techno-solutionism and engaging sociotechnical explanations instead, Kwadwo Oti-Sarpong and Reyhaneh Shojaei analyse the social context for transforming construction through digital innovation in a timely report published earlier this year. Wondering why it’s so hard to move the needle? In a fascinating tour of the complexities of built environment systems and projects, Brian Potter describes how “tradition and culture in construction” can often seem “load bearing - ‘the way we’ve always done it’ is the answer to how we’re able to do it all.”
Earlier this year, former StateUp researcher Bluebell Drummond explored the role of PPT in levelling up and empowering local places.
The StateUp View: Harvey Logan, Associate
Transport for Humans by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland proposes better incorporating behavioural science into transport planning, and contains insightful, neatly conceptualised suggestions that counter traditional planning assumptions. The sections examining travellers' motivations, as well as that disputing the inflated value placed on measurable attributes like speed or efficiency, are especially constructive.
State of Resilience: How Ukraine’s Digital Government Is Supporting Its Citizens During the War The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change outlines how the Ukrainian government’s use of modern communications infrastructure and rapid modernisation of its public services are bearing fruit in supporting Ukraine’s impressive resistance. For a remarkable exploration of the public procurement infrastructure Ukraine has been developing since 2014, check out this 2018 Wired long read by Rowland Manthorpe. Today, it reads as both belonging to a different historical moment and as timely as it gets.
The StateUp View: Luke Cavanaugh, summer fellow alumnus
'We Became like a Big Startup': How Kyiv Adapted the City's Tech to Save Lives - Hardly Christmassy, but this was the article in 2022 that made me sit up and listen to just how important digital government services can be. Chronologically situated at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it tells of the government's attempts to drastically improvise digital services to keep their citizens safe and alive.
What’s on your PPT holiday bookshelf? Let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter (#TheNewPPT) or via email.