Are you part of a digital team, working within government, to build and deliver high-impact digital services?
Are you interested in learning from other teams facing similar challenges in partner countries? In building a community of knowledge to promote best practices in the emerging field of digital public service delivery?
Come join us in Paris for an international meet-up for product teams working in government!
Hosted and organized by beta.gouv.fr, the French government’s incubator for Digital Public Services, the conference will be held over the course of two days, on September 28 and 29, in Paris (France).
The design and delivery of digital public services being an emerging field, and the opportunities for collaboration which emerge from sharing open source software, make it timely and necessary to foster collaboration where possible.
The conference is not so much aimed at high-level officials or traditional IT departments, but more towards the actual digital teams responsible for production and deployment, and attuned to lean and agile methodologies.
We are especially hoping to meet people who participate directly in building and scaling digital services, such as Lead Developers, Product Managers, Service Designers etc.
The goal of this meet-up is to create an environnement where teams who have experience creating public digital services can honestly share experiences on past successes (and less successful endeavours), so we can collectively learn from each other’s experiences. We hope that these exchanges will foster collaboration in the future around open source software and best practices in digital service delivery. We would be excited to discuss how to achieve greater advocacy at European and international levels.
We are hoping to create discussion around common challenges faced by digital teams within government, such as:
We will work with the teams who confirm their attendance to identify before-hand interesting topics which would merit a workshop on the day of the seminar: a particular success which could be easily replicated elsewhere, recurring challenges for teams and organisations of a certain size, a focus-group for teams working in a similar area of public policy (for example, digital teams working to create services for job-seekers)…
We have tried to design this event to promote discussions and collaboration rather than choosing a classic conference format. The Open Forum format (also known as “unconference” or “open space technology”) allows participants to define for themselves the topics for discussion and to pro-actively propose hands-on workshops (for example, peer-coding sessions, user research workshops, product demos etc.).
The proposed agenda is as follows:
Wednesday 28th of September
• Morning: 30 minute lightning talks from each team, showcasing products or services developed by their team, or zooming in on industry problems that have yet to be “cracked” (TBC depending on the list of attendees). Ideally, these short talks can serve as a jumping off point for workshops later in the afternoon.
• Afternoon: open forum
• Evening: dinner organized by beta.gouv.fr
Thursday 29th of September
• Morning: open forum
• Afternoon: open forum
• Evening: dinner organized by beta.gouv.fr
The impulse to organize this meet-up stems from the realization that there exists no practitionner-led network promoting best practices and inter-country collaboration around the design and delivery of user-centric digital services.
The design and delivery of digital public services is an emerging field, where best practices are usually learned through a process of trial and error.
Building digital services within government can be a lonely place: our teams’s position as internal digital experts within government means they are faced with unique challenges, at the intersection of the world of technology and public administration.
At beta.gouv.fr, reading blog posts and public documentation of digital service teams in partner countries has been a huge source of inspiration. It has given us the momentum to try to replicate major successes, challenged us to rethink some of our practices and has helped us to structure our programme in a way to make it more legible to senior stake-holders within government.
Our hope is that through an in-person meeting, we can create the energy and momentum to:
The event will be hosted in the 15th arrondissement in Paris, in the French government’s offices.
If you are interested in attending or have any questions regarding the event, please write to Beatrice (beatrice.mercier@beta.gouv.fr) and Benjamin (benjamin.doberset@beta.gouv.fr)
We hope you’ll consider attending!
