Unit 1
How David Eaves teaches Unit 1 (part 2)
COVID Trace Together Case
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 1 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part one of Unit 1 is taught here.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in a range of contexts. To see how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit, click here.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
The goal of this class is to make students aware of all the complexities involved the digitization of government services. While this class is based on the pre-reading of the Singapore's *TraceTogether case,* instructors can choose other cases for which they can get insider's views. Possible cases include HealthCare.Gov, the Phoenix payment disaster in Canada, the Census debacle in Australia and the NHS healthcare records implementation in the UK.
Context for this this Class: In the early days of COVID-19, the Singapore’s Government Technology Agency and Ministry of Health developed and deployed the world’s first Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, in just eight weeks. Days after its launch, Singapore’s foreign minister announced plans to open-source the technology to promote international adoption. This class will use the TraceTogether case to introduce different issues central to the topic of digital government such as privacy, security, data management, design, procurement, and user experience. These topics will be further explored throughout the course.
A secondary and optional objective is to get students to begin thinking critically about when digital technologies can help address a challenge, merely serve as a distraction or worse, make a problem worse.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Identify capabilities that governments should develop to succeed in the digital age.
Identify challenges that governments face as being 'digital era challenges'.
Identify assumptions that underlie the adoption of government digital services.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This second lecture of the course does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course by getting students to brainstorm many of the challenges the eight competencies to address.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What new digital era challenges did the team have to deal with?
What new capabilities the team had or could have profited from to deploy this solution?
Required Readings
TraceTogether (2020), Case Study by Mitchell Weiss and Sarah Mehta for the Harvard Business School
Optional Advanced Reading
Public Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Cyber Attack on Singapore Health Services Pte. Ltd.'s Patient Database (2019), Report of Singapore's Committee of Inquiry (Website here)
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
See David's slides for this class.
The sections below describe the suggested dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
Assumptions – 15'
This section highlights the assumptions policy makers risk making when implementing digital services for a community.
Purpose
One common reason digital solutions fail is due to an inability to understand the context and capabilities of the target community. These assumptions might relate to the available infrastructure, the governments technical capacity, the skills and capabilities of the community, among others.
Discussion Questions
To explore this risk and push students to test their assumptions David asks participants to put themselves in the shoes of the TraceTogether team and brainstorm capabilities or assumptions the deployed solution will rely on.
Some common responses should include:
Trust - Do people have trust in the government regarding data security and privacy?
Coverage - Do people have access to the technology? Which groups might not have access?
Skills - Do people know how to use the technology?
Utility - Do people think the solution is useful? Is the benefit balanced by its convenience?
Infrastructure - Is the required infrastructure - such as internet connectivity or smart phone access - in place?
When these questions are asked, the team working on the project has a stronger likelihood of developing a hypothesis that can both address the problem and be adopted by citizens. The answers will also help them make important product and services' decisions.
Video of David teaching this segment
Capabilities – 35'
The aim of this section is to create awareness about the complexities involved in providing digital solutions to citizens.
Purpose
One risk with digital technologies is for policy makers or politicians to oversimplify and focus on a specific part of the solution - such as an "app." The reality is any digital service is embedded within and shaped by a complex web of rules, culture, norms, and infrastructure.
Exercise and Debrief
To begin developing an awareness of the web, David asks breaks students into groups for 7-10 minutes to brainstorm the capabilities that will be required and compliance issues that will have to be satisfied to develop and deploy the TraceTogether app.
During the debrief, several capabilities should be mentioned. Some of the most common include:
ability to work across government entities
in-house technical skills
communication skills
ability to engage in user testing/user research
acquisitions and contracts' management
cybersecurity and privacy
project management; and
ability to finance projects.
These answers illustrate that capabilities go beyond technicalities and oftentimes require a multidisciplinary approach.
Reflections
A secondary learning objective of this section is to treat the complexity of rules as both a challenge and a problematic itself worth examining. Does the complexity of compliance enable or hinder governments ability to develop and deploy digital services? In the case of TraceTogether the team was able to circumvent many of the requirements - this allowed it to move quickly and, in many ways, deliver a product that was focused on users. But if circumventing the rules is a benefit... why do the rules exist? Or are their risks and issues TraceTogether is simply ignoring?
The goal here is to get students to start to think about what policies and practices are needed to enable a digital era government, and what should be questioned.
Video of David teaching this segment
Public concerns - 10'
This section highlights the importance of incorporating public concerns into the design of a digital solutions.
Reflections
One risk around deploying digital services is that teams focus on addressing the network of rules and compliance outlined above at the expense of meeting citizens needs or effectively resolving the core problem.
General public concerns such as privacy, security, effectiveness and efficacy are often easy to imagine. However, how they public reacts to them in practice is often more nuanced and subtle and cannot be discovered without citizen engagement. In the TraceTogether case, user research found that citizens had incongruent privacy expectations. While the new application - TraceTogether - generated real fears of privacy violations, a more established application that was much more invasive stirred little concern among the public.
David's goal is to use the TraceTogether case to illustrate how interacting with the public makes teams aware of publics concerns and can help prioritize and respond to them when deploying digital services.
Video of David teaching this segment
Final reflection and wrapping up - 15'
This section puts together all the considerations analyzed in the previous sections to understand the trade-offs policy makers face when deciding whether or not to deploy a digital solution.
⚠️ Notes for the facilitator In this delivery of this section David ran low on time and which meant students were unable to sufficiently explore the complexity of this decision.
Purpose
Choosing how, or if, to deploy a digital product or service is a complex and difficult task. It involves deciding which capabilities to outsource or develop, analyzing risks and managing public concerns. It is also a political decision. All these trade-offs need to be accounted for when making a final decision.
Exercise and Debrief
To explore this, David again makes students take on the role of decision maker by asking them play the role of the Governor of Massachusetts (Facilitators should choose a local government official of their choice, HKS is located in Massachusetts). Students are asked to reflect on the following scenario: The State of Massachusetts CIO suggests rolling out a contact tracing app as a response to COVID-19. Should they, as Governor, say 'yes'? (This can be engaging to initially run as a poll - particularly if delivering the course online)
There is no correct 'answers.' The lesson objective is there will always be reasons to say 'yes' or 'no' to a digital solution and the policy maker's trade-offs will include technical, administrative, and political implications.
The TraceTogether Case was chosen to make students aware of the numerous complexities and requirements that designing a digital solution involve. The issues outlined in this case form the topics that will be the focus of the coming classes to allow students to dive deeper into and further explore these issues.
Video of David teaching this segment
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- If the decision to implement digital solutions involves several complexities and risks but governments tend to be risk averse, how can we break these barriers and foster innovation?
How can you get support teaching this unit?
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Send a message to mailbox@teachingpublicservice.digital if you want to book in a call or have any questions.
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We are proud to use the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age syllabus in our curriculum and teaching. Developed by an international community of more than 20 professors and practitioners, the syllabus is available open-source and free at www.teachingpublicservice.digital
Why was this page created?
This teaching material forms part of the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age project. Read more about it here.
Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.