This book draws heavily as you would expect from the experience in government but it draws on many examples from the private sector too. And in my own experience working with corporates it’s clear to me that the challenges for government and the private sector are largely the same. As summed up in the epilogue: “The difference for governments and organisations that invest in actively responding to an uncertain future is that the worst outcome is that they learn something. For those who stick incuriously to what they know, the worst outcome is that they aren’t needed anymore”.

So if you are are a senior leader who wants to know how to do digital transformation at scale you need to read this book. If you are an emergent leader struggling with how to win the argument for change you need to read this book. Basically if you want to do digital transformation at scale and do it well. You need to read this book. ​

As part of our work engaging potential Friends of The Federation we’ve been working with the wonderful folk in Northcoders. We really wanted them as part of our community because they are such a fit with our ethical values. In learning more about what they do one of their founders James Brooke explained that every cohort they offer two free places to women because they are committed to diversity and changing the ratio #womenintech

Northcoders offer two #womenintech scholarships but there’s a limit to what they are able to do themselves. Which begged the question how many women had applied and were eligible for the course?  Turns out they had applications from 20 women which means 18 suitable candidates in Manchester losing out on an amazing opportunity. That’s 18 new women software developers into the tech ecosystem. That’s an opportunity to act that does not come around that often. What if we could make that scale?

In the recent past I worked as an Associate with EY supporting the EY Women Fast Forward programme so I pinged an email to the amazing Uschi Schreiber EY's Global Vice Chair, Markets. It was a simple email. It said “there are 18 women in Manchester qualified to take a course to turn them into software developers, they need some funding can you help”? Two days later I got a response from her “Love this idea. Need to figure out how to support. Give me a day or two”. 

And sure enough after two days Gemma Williams who works with Uschi messaged me saying “it’s a go we’ll fund six of them”.  Just like that.  Typically in big organizations it takes months to get a decision. There is all sorts of bureaucracy to navigate, all sorts of stakeholders who need to get involved. By recognizing the need, by understanding the importance of helping women, by understanding that Northcoders are a young company and by actually “DOING” Uschi and EY have done an amazing thing that will make a genuine impact exactly where we need it most. Giving women the opportunity to enter the technology community gaining employment in a city where 40% of our population are under the poverty line. EY have now committed to funding for this on an annual basis. And so in case you are wondering - this is what leadership looks like. 

So we moved to Manchester over the weekend and have been exploring this lovely city lots. We knew of course that it would take some time before we sorted our broadband in the apartment. So I'm completely reliant on my mobile. I'm using personal hotspot to tether and we even managed to catch up with some TV on Netflix using my O2 package. Great.

Then yesterday my signal fell out completely. I mean TOTALLY. No texting calls or surfing. MMMM I thought after two hours there must be an outage. Since my hubby was in London I couldn't use his phone and that's when the fun started. So having turned the phone on and off a gazillion times, removing the battery and the SIM still dead as a dodo I find myself loitering around the Revolution Pub near us to log onto their free wifi so I can at least text my better half to let him know what's up. 

It's a lovely place. They are lovely people. Is it the kind of place a fifty something woman shiftily trying to access the wifi should be hanging out at 10.30 at night. Nope. Tramped back to apartment and then spent about 2 hours trying to access any of the WIFI networks around me frantically trying to guess passwords. People have gotten much better at hard passwords. That's good. But not for me. I finally accepted it an evening disconnected from the world. To bed and hopefully situation resolved tomorrow.

The alarm goes off at 7.30 and I reach for the phone. STILL NO SIGNAL. Right then too early for 02 shop to open I find the nearest place with free WiFi (Mc Donald's) settle down with a McMuffin and start the web chat with the O2 live web chat service. And very good they were. Within five minutes of hand holding the operative tells me that someone identifying themselves as me has answered all the security questions and reported my phone stolen. Hence 02 shutting everything down. That's good. So I think right I'll just get another temporary SIM while I wait 24 HOURS before service is restored. (In fairness it was back within 6 - thank you 02). So down to the shop where the lovely Lisa sells me a Pay As You Go SIM and a Dongle so that I can connect to my laptop - Hurrah problem sorted.

Back at the apartment I thought I'd try the SIM/Dongle laptop first. Nope! can't use that since I have to have a password to verify and in order to do that I have to log on. Ok I'll use the temporary SIM in the phone and verify online there. NOPE! STILL NO SERVICE. Sigh.

Tramp back down to the store where the fantastic Lisa tells me after looking at my phone that everything is locked down including the phone so I can't use the temporary SIM. You can tell what I'm like at this stage. Fearing armagaddon Lisa quietly suggests that for £9.99 I can buy a cheap phone to use the SIM. She also tells me that if I round it up to £10.00 the extra penny will go to charity. What are the chances I'm going to say no. She's really kind. She gets the phone and puts the SIM in in while the equally lovely Paul tries to sort the other SIM for the Dongle. And then she hands it to me......

Words fail me. I mean really fail me. I'm prodding and poking at the screen. Lisa is looking at me very sympathetically. I appreciate that especially since she's wearing some sort of Ghostbusters back pack that's twice the size of her. That must be hard. Anyway. "YOU. NEED. TO. PRESS. THE. BUTTONS" she says very slowly like people do when they think people don't speak English. She's like a reverse Digital Native. She goes off to get the bill and I turn to Paul. He puts his hands in the air as if to say "beyond me". "I might kill someone if I have to use this" I say. By the time I leave the shop I've only managed to text my husband Tony (now in contacts as TO!NKY as its some kind of weird predictive text thingy and an interface worse than SKY TV) with one word "Me".

Thankfully by the time I eventually get back to the apartment my contract service is restored. This is good. What is less good is the gazillion texts from my Bank to tell me about all the unauthorized transactions on my account. Whoever worked out the 02 hack has had a merry spending spree and my bank account is considerably lighter. Thankfully their fraud people are brilliant and I'll get it back. But it's a lesson learned. For all my knowledge about technology I'm as laissez fair as most around passwords and have realized why my mother has such difficulties using the phone she has. Older and more vulnerable people should be given access to the best technology not the cheapest. Alcatel One Touch - One Touch? My ass

And just one additional fact about Gleneagles if you are an Art Deco fan (which I so am) then you'll love it there see snapshot of ballroom roof and one of the beautiful hallways (I want those lamps!)

Last year I visited Uber HQ in London . It was one of those really, really hot London summer days. As I arrived at the office I noticed a rather long line of men outside the building waiting in the blazing sun. As I went inside and upstairs to where the real Uber staff worked behind their lovely Apple Macs I couldn’t help wondering why there were no comfortable waiting facilities for the drivers. Thinking about it afterwards of course it was clear. The Uber staff are employees and the drivers well they are just commodities.

I don’t intend to go into the many many things that are wrong with Uber as a company (just search #ubered on Twitter for a second by second ribbon of stories) but it did get me thinking about a quote from Steven Hill’s book Raw Deal that:
“Technology has been granted a privileged and indulged place where the usual rules, laws and policies often are not applied”.
Are we so in love with the concept of disruption as a force for good that we cannot see what is happening right in front of us? While Airbnb is touted as the little man or woman making some extra money on the side the reality is that almost 80% of the revenues are generated by corporate landlords and multiple hosts.

And while we might be in love with the idea of disintermediation, cutting out the middle man and getting that super cheap room, what we are really dealing with there is disintermediation of the planning system. This is impacting both the availability of scarce rental housing in cities all over the world while also impacting on residential property owners who might reasonably expect some protection from their local authority planners who have zoned areas for residential and not tourist purposes.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not against anyone earning some money from short term room lets, I’m against the disingenuous description of what is actually going on and the use by companies like Airbnb and Uber of their selected users to create outcrys against any form of regulation. It speaks to a terrific quote by danah boyd speaking about the tech industry generally:
“They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings”.
Why are all the lessons we learned from almost thirty years of Corporate Social Responsibility policies being so easily forgotten? Does it sit comfortably with you as a user of Facebook that content moderation is outsourced? Not of course undertaken by real Facebook staff who benefited from what was then the highest IPO for a tech company on Wall Street but by workers in developing countries who get $1 dollar an hour for this horrific work?
It’s like there is a sewer 
channel and all of the 
mess/dirt/ waste/
of the world flow 
towards you 
and you have to clean it.” Facebook Moderator Phillipines
Is it right that over 500,000 million Asians disparagingly referred to as “Chinese Gold Farmers” are forced to sit in 12 hour shifts obsessively playing Massive Multiplayer Online Games to earn tokens to be traded offline receiving 30p an hour for their endeavours? When companies who trade these virtual goods are generating such huge profits? We need to redefine what is value and production what is profit and play if play is understood to be entered into freely for its own sake standing entirely apart from real life.

If we look again at our understanding of production and value do we need to redefine what we mean? Let’s compare how Marx defined production and see how it applies to something like - well Gmail.
Does a worker in a cotton factory produce only cotton? No. He produces capital. He produces values which serve anew to command his work and to create by means of it new values. ( Karl Marx 1891)
When you send an email are you only corresponding? No. You are producing capital. They derive value (data) which serve anew to command your activities and to create by means of it new values. 
(Emer Coleman 2016)
Every keystroke we make, every email we send and receive, makes us not just service users but in this context workers yet we do not benefit in any way that we understand we might as employees. Yet that’s exactly what we are, we are all shadow employees for Facebook, Google, Twitter and the myriad of other digital companies that we use. And let’s not go there with the “Sharing Economy”, I shared my pictures with Instagram they didn’t share their $1 billion loot.
This might not matter too much now but with the rise of robotics and automation and the hollowing out of middle class jobs that will surely follow how will we really feel about the yawning gap that is opening up between capital and labour? If in the US the decade between 2000 and 2010 was the first in US history that saw no job growth whatsoever is it any wonder that the likes of Donald Trump are beginning to resonate with those the economy has swept aside?
This is no longer about Engineering it’s about Social Engineering something we should surely be deeply concerned about because a key prerequisite for social engineering is having:
A body of reliable information about the society that is to be engineered and effective tools to carry out the engineeringWell how about this for a start for that required body of reliable information?
Concepts and topics discussed in email, 
as well as email attachments
The content of websites that users have visited
Demographic information — including 
income, sex, race, marital status
Geographic information
Psychographic information — 
personality type, values, attitudes, interests, 
and lifestyle interests
Previous searches users have made
Information about documents a user 
viewed and or edited by the users
Browsing activity
Previous purchases
Which we signed away in perpetuity to Google for the use of Gmail and for which we got in return a gigabyte of storage which even at that early stage only cost Google $2 per gigabyte per year. Have we no worries really about the current and future uses of our data - it’s time in my view to renegotiate the contract.
As Tom Steinberg writes so well in his Manifesto for Public Technology:
If we are going to limit and control the activities of digital companies then a new class of public servants are going to have to be trained up to do that work.But it’s not just regulators and public officials who will need to completely change their approaches and skills what of our responsibilities in this regard? Do we as users have no consumer power? Or no responsibility to begin redefining what we mean by Corporate Social Responsibility in a digital age? Are we to remain silent as shadow employees of The Social Factory where there are no longer clear boundaries between work and play, where even as we play and use social media we are nought but worker drones?
We need to talk Techno Ethics and we need to act because our future is being designed around and to us. The new public servants are not those who work for government only but those who are willing to develop policy for the real and the virtual world. Society no longer stands apart from Cyber Society so where lies democracy in this brave new world and what are we going to do about it? I don’t know the answer but I know we can do better but only if we make our voices heard.

I was absolutely delighted to be asked to participate in the Abbey Theatre of Change Symposium  which took place in Dublin from the 21st to 23rd January.  This is the third and final international symposium and follows the hugely successful Theatre of Memory  and Theatre of War  series both of which questioned the role of commemoration, the nature of conflict and the danger of national narratives. 

The Theatre of Change Symposium is the start of the Waking the Nation  season and its primary focus was examining the responsibility of citizens to engage with issues of the near future and the role of artists to shape it. It was without doubt one of the most extraordinary events that I have been involved with for a long time. Day 2 where I was speaking kicked off with Irish artist Jackie Irvine  talking about her novel Days of Surrender.  The book's starting point is a very rare photograph that shows the feet of Elizabeth O'Farrell midwife and 1916 volutneer who had been asked to make a perilous walk from Dublins General Post Office down the sniper-lined streets to act as an agent of negotiation for the formal surrender to the British Army. Poking out from behind the figure of Padraic Pearse (leader of the Irish Volunteers) Elizabeths feet are clearly visible in the picture but all subsequent publications of the  image include doctored versions where the feet are removed and with it the trace of a woman's presence and resistance to the British state. It was fascinating to hear Jaki narrate the literal erasure of the role of Irish women in this important moment in the history of the state.

I followed Jaki with a session called Big Data: Owning Your Own Story looking at content in the digital age and told some stories about my previous life in the arts in Ireland in the 1980's no trace of which remains because all events occurred before the creation of the Internet. Describing myself as a ghost in the machine in the Irish arts landscape of the 80's I tried to stress the importance of all of our creative stories being available to ensure we have a complete history or our collective creative contributions. Judging from the Twitter responses from the audience, largely theatre and visual arts practictioners, as well as regular Abbey audience members, what resonated most was my comment:

Author Andrew O'Hagan  followed with a brilliant tour de force Stealing Lives: Does Your Story Belong To You? which interrogated what it means to be a writer, the ethical challenges when writing about real people or when writing about members of families including your own. It provided a wonderful insight into the mind of a writer who has explored the issue of identity in some quite challenging and interesting ways.

Theatre director Zoe Lafferty  talked about Theatre, Resistance and Change sharing her experience of working as a director in Afghanistan, Yemen, Palenstine, Syria, Haiti and Lebanon. Her recounting of working with the Palestine Freedom Theatre  had the audience spellbound as had the notion of using culture as a form of resistance. Often artists explore these issues but rarely place themselves in the site of actual danger. It was captivating, challenging and humbling to hear her talk about how theatre and storytelling can challenge the status quo, expose human rights violations and tell the human perspective behind war one that is often misrepresented in the media.

Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy  had the audience on their feet for a sustained standing ovation for his talk The Israeli Society And The Endless Occupation. His was a bleak view about what the future holds for both Israel and Palestine but what captivated the audience most I think was his 30 year career calling Israel to account for the Palestinian plight. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied  Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda.  “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many  Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many  people want him silenced. He pointed to a "moral blindness" on the part of Israelis which allows them to ignore the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people. It was an exceptional display of moral courage and integrity speaking truth to power without fear of personal repercussions of which there are many.

But for me, the highlight of the day was the presentation by Dr Emer O Toole  and Dr Susan Cahill  in what was both an entertaining and profound 45 minutes. Their talk/performance The Man Problem was brilliantly framed by legal affairs editor Derbhail McDonald  who brought the audience through the 30 year heartache  of the abortion "situation" in Ireland. For readers not familiar with this tragic terrain the tldr version is this. Over 30 years ago in Ireland we had a referendum. We agreed to allow abortions where it was proven that the life of the mother was at risk. But in a typical Irish solution to an Irish problem we failed to legislate and the successive years have seen nothing but trouble and heartache. Emer and Susan are part of a campaign to repeal the eight amendment to the Irish constitution. In a very clever presentation Emer kicked off using a male persona on stage to model the usual stereotypical male approaches but making the important point that women get pregnant not men - yet our almost entirely male decisions makers are the only voices that are heard on the topic. Their clever slide made this point eloquently.

But it was Susan stepping forward to take the mic to talk about her own abortion that really drove the point home. Stories are a powerful way of helping us reach consensus, developing empathy even when we hold differing points of view. But there are few stories about abortions in Ireland because women cannot speak out. So it was the first time I have ever heard a young Irish woman describe why she had an abortion, how she felt and how the eight amendment makes her feel about her relationship with her own country. It was certainly a first for a woman on the stage of the National Theatre to declare that deeply personal experience to the world. "I don't fee shame. None" she said. It was just fantastic to demonstrate that kind of courageous leadership creating spaces for other women to find their voices. Because when it comes to abortion it is not male voices that should have the mic because it's women who need to be centre stage on that issue. I applaud both Emer and Susan on their courage and I'll follow their work with keen interest from the other side of the pond. 

And in a lovely final piece of serendipity we got to share our taxi to the airport with the amazingly interesting Penny Arcade and talked all the way about the intersection of art and technology and the future of our world. As you do.

I was delighted to chair the inaugural meeting of the Open Data Governance Board in Dublin last Tuesday. It was great that Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin TD, was able to join us to outline his views on the importance of open data as a key element of the Irish Government's Reform Agenda. 
 
Head of the Open Data Unit, Evelyn O'Connor, gave the Board a comprehensive background briefing on the progress made to date as well as the challenges facing the Irish public service in delivering open data that meets real user needs. I followed that with a short summary of my thoughts fairly self explanatory from the presentation below.

Full summary of the meeting here and agreed next steps. For the next few months I'll be managing the Twitter account

So get in touch if you'd like to talk to me about open data in Ireland or you can email me at odgbireland@gmail.com 

I’ve ben following the #wakingthefeminists debate in Ireland which was the social media response to the recent announcement of The Abbey Theatre 2016 Programme which, unfortunately, had only one play written by a woman of the ten plays programmed in total. I’ll raise my hand here and declare that I am an old friend of the Artistic Director Fiach MacConghail and given the activity on Twitter had reason to remember that I’d been the person who suggested he should join the platform several years ago.

I work with a lot of senior people around digital literacy some of which includes encouraging them to use social media to provide more open leadership. A key sign of course of whether they get it or not is how they behave when things don’t go as they might have liked. Do they stay open and accessible? Or do they suddenly become silent? So the debate was a testing one in this regard and I think it is to his credit that Fiach did not become suddenly incommunicado. I was also struck by the differences in the arts and culture sector and the gaming/tech sector. In the latter women who declare themselves feminists or express forcible options become the subject of  horrendous abuse and trolling as evidenced by the whole #gamergate saga something that was covered in last years brilliant Inspirefest and which I wrote about in my blog Stamping Feet of Social Sword. While I’m sure there has been some negative feedback to the women participating in the campaign, what’s been amazing to see has been the open solidarity expressed around the world by so many women for Irish women playwrights and the need for greater gender parity in the arts.