Before adding a fresh batch of failures to the collection, I figured I should probably check to see if I learned from the first one.

The results are mixed.

Old Failure #1: The AI voice problem

I think I’m getting better at this. But AI use is also getting more debated and polarised. For example, there’s a fascinating debate happening in the content creator world right now about AI. I recently listened to a podcast that dug into it really well, and one thing has stuck with me: in a world increasingly full of AI-generated everything, people seem to be craving authenticity even more. They want to hear from the actual person.

I’m using more AI, and increasingly for more complex tasks. I’m particularly interested in agents and how they can expand what one person is capable of doing. But I’m becoming much more sensitive to maintaining my own voice on the content I produce and share.

One thing that likely would be valuable for me to do is to write a Civic Punks AI policy that outlines the guidelines and philosophy for how Civic Punks uses (and does not use) AI. This will need to be a living document as the space is moving so fast.

So: progress. But this one is still very much in flux.

Old Failure #2: Terrible audio

Improvement here has been… uneven.

I had a great conversation with Petra Holm while I was in Estonia. About halfway through the interview, I realized I had forgotten to give her a microphone. The microphone was still sitting back in the boardroom. … So that was good.

Then there was my interview with Kateryna Frolova from the Kyiv Global Government Technology Centre. Great conversation. Unfortunately, I was apparently so excited and rushed setting everything up that I completely failed to check the camera framing. The result is a video featuring Kateryna, my nose, and two arms occasionally flapping into frame. I’m currently trying to figure out whether the footage is salvageable or whether this particular Civic Punks video is destined to become a podcast.

I am getting better at editing, particularly the audio. I am apparently still learning the ancient filmmaking technique of looking at the camera before pressing record.

So Progress?

Old Failure #3: Logistics

Actual good news: I think I improved here. The biggest lesson is simply: start earlier. Flights, visas, meetings, accommodation and travel between cities become dramatically less stressful when you deal with them right away. There were still a few moments when I was waiting on other people before I could lock things down, but overall, I think we can mark this one as an improvement. And I am starting even earlier for my next leg to South America.

*pats self on the back

Old Failure #4: Losing the plot

I think I’ve done better here too. I’ve spent the first two legs being deliberately expansive; following people, conversations and ideas that seemed interesting and seeing where they led. I don’t regret that. In fact, it’s produced some of my favourite Civic Punks moments.

But at some point curiosity needs focus. Leg 3 needs to be more intentional about the questions I’m trying to answer, the stories I’m looking for and what actually deserves my time (and your time).

Ok, so what new things did I screw up?

New Failure #1: I built a content project that stopped producing content

For a while, I felt like every newsletter I wrote started with some version of: Sorry this is late. Eventually you have to stop apologizing and fix the problem.

The bigger issue was the Civic Punks YouTube and the podcast. They basically disappeared for two months. Which is somewhat inconvenient when that is the heart of what you do.

I had assumed I could travel all day, meet people, record interviews, get back to wherever I was staying and then edit videos and podcasts at night. Learning from Leg 1, in Leg 2 I also blocked off large chunks of time for this. But I just found I was often mentally cooked and in the wrong headspace. Add inconsistent internet and video files that take forever to upload, and the grand plan of editing from the road mostly collapsed.

The irony is that I was generating tons of material. I just wasn’t publishing any of it. And this made me realize something fairly obvious in hindsight: If Civic Punks only publishes reliably when I’m not busy doing Civic Punks, I haven’t built a very good system. Fortunately, this should be very fixable.

Before the next big travel period, I want a real content pipeline, finished pieces waiting in reserve, and a runway that matches the length I am on the road (plus a week or two)

New Failure #2: Project Get Out of My Parents’ Basement just got real

Back in May, I wrote a newsletter called Project Get Out of My Parents’ Basement about how I was thinking about making Civic Punks sustainable. At the time, the title was partly a joke. It has now become much more real. The savings that I set aside for this project are now gone. And recently I started watching the numbers move into the red. That was an oh shit moment!

Right now, I have the incredible privilege of living with my parents. Thank you, Mum and Dad. They are definitely giving me a family discount. That has given me space to experiment with Civic Punks in a way I probably couldn’t otherwise. But that is not a sustainable business model.

Next year, I’d really like to move out. Hopefully move in with my partner. Pay normal-person rent. Have a life that isn’t dependent on my parents subsidizing my questionable career decisions; I am almost 40, after all…

So if I had such a good plan back in May, why am I still not sustainable? Beyond just being really bad at business, part of the problem is something I suspect a lot of people doing mission-driven work struggle with. I give a lot away for free. I do it because I care about the work. Because I like helping people. Because an opportunity seems interesting. Because I want something useful to exist.

None of those are bad reasons. But I’ve been learning that there is a difference between generosity and building something that depends on me working for free. If I want Civic Punks to keep existing, I need to get much better at understanding the value I create — and actually asking people to pay for it. This might mean saying no to some cool opportunities that I really want to do but would need to do for free.

This is going to be one of my main focuses over the next few months. I’m working on several ways people and organizations can support Civic Punks, including the community membership/patron program I’m hoping to launch in the next week or two.

I’m also trying to make it much easier for people who already want to help to know how they can help. That might mean joining the community. It might mean bringing Civic Punks into an event. It might mean a partnership, a briefing, an introduction, or simply pointing me toward an opportunity I should know about.

So yes, this is also an ask.

If you value what Civic Punks is becoming and see a way to help make it sustainable, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Send me an email at derekalton@civicpunks.com or whatever platform works for you.

So that’s Failure Report #2. Some old mistakes fixed. Some apparently requiring further study. And a few more consequential ones entering the conversation. I still believe strongly in failing forward. But I’m realizing the important part isn’t celebrating failure. It’s whether you actually change what you do afterwards.

Speaking of content, I am back on track and starting to release my interviews from my Europe Leg, starting with a wild interview deserving its own action moving, with Victoria about her experience as CIO of Kyiv during the first 6 weeks of the war with Russia. Check it out; more coming soon.

What does the future of government actually look like?

In Estonia, I was trying to understand how the country became one of the world’s most advanced digital states. In Helsinki, I found myself talking to people who were asking a slightly different question:

What kind of government will we need for the world that is now emerging?

The future is surprisingly medieval

(me standing outside the gates of old Tallinn)

On the heels of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, I arrived in Tallinn expecting the future. After all, Estonia is the most talked about country in the world when it comes to digital government. The one we all point to as our north star. It has secure digital identity, connected government services, interoperable data infrastructure, and a public that is comfortable interacting with the state online. Its X-Road infrastructure is legendary, and allows independent public and private systems to exchange data securely without requiring one giant central database. So naturally, I expected something slightly science fiction. Instead, I found a medieval city.

The centre of Tallinn is surrounded by old stone walls. You walk through cobbled streets, underneath church spires, past people dressed as medieval merchants (it’s for the tourists, I know, but I love it). There were no holograms or futuristic flashy transit; I remember thinking the tram could have been from the soviet era. There were lots of little robots though, delivering packages.

However, successful digital transformation is often invisible. It does not necessarily change what a city looks like. It changes the relationship between people and institutions underneath the surface. The buildings can be medieval while the government infrastructure quietly operates several steps ahead.

Stop using Estonia as an excuse

I always remember when I worked in the Government of Canada and Estonia came up; there were always these excuses. Estonia is tiny and highly centralized. They started from scratch without all this legacy. Canada is way bigger with a more complex federalist governance. We have all this legacy policy, tech and culture that we can’t just imagine away.

There is truth in all of this. Context matters. You cannot copy and paste a government model from one country into another and expect it to work. But I have become increasingly frustrated by the way context gets used as an excuse not to learn or do anything.

Estonia did not start from an easy position. It emerged from the Soviet Union poor, isolated, under-resourced, and deeply concerned about its own security and survival. The country did not stumble accidentally into becoming a digital leader. It made choices, not excuses.

(Me with Petra Holm, who gave the e-Estonia orientation. People come from all over the world to learn about the story of Estonia’s digital miracle, and they get to hear from Petra)

One of those choices was to invest heavily in digital literacy. This was not just about teaching children how to use computers (although they did do that). It was about helping build a society that could participate in an increasingly digital world, including adults and older people who had not grown up with the technology. They called the program the Tiger Leap, and it laid the foundation for everything that came after, including Estonia becoming the source of the greatest number of Unicorns (startups worth over a billion) in Europe. See, these investments not only make for a better government but also a stronger economy.

(Me reflecting on some of the Estonian-based Unicorns, how many do you know?)

Another thing that struck me, through conversations with people including Siim Sikkut and Kristo Vaher (former Estonian CIO and CTO, and now at Digital Nation), was the movement between government and the technology sector. People moved back and forth. They brought ideas, relationships, and different ways of thinking with them. This helped prevent government from becoming a sealed container, cut off from the wider changes happening around it.

(Siim and Kristo signing my Civic Punks Tour Shirt)

My favourite project I got to work on in the Government of Canada, the GCTools, was created when a couple of people from the private sector did a stint in the Government and saw a gap they knew they could fill. We have done it in the past; we can do more of it.

Again, Estonia’s size probably made that easier. But digital literacy and movement between sectors are not uniquely Estonian ideas. They are choices that lots of countries make, including Canada, sometimes…

That is what I keep coming back to.

Estonia should be treated as a source of lessons, not a source of excuses.

What happens when you lean into lessons

A country that is doing this well is one I had just visited, Ukraine. Unlike the rest of us who have been busy making excuses, Ukraine has forked over a lot of the key infrastructure, including the famous X-road. Though as a quick sidebar, I was surprised to learn that instead of using the public, open-source version of X-Road, Ukraine has purchased a proprietary version owned by an Estonian company. This taps into the old debate of open source vs proprietary. They get better support through the company but are no longer contributing or tapping into the larger public project. They are also now locked into this vendor. Another example of a missed opportunity for government to properly invest in open source (sigh).

(Me reflecting on Ukraine forking Estonia’s x-Road, why am I disappointed?)

But the key thing I want to highlight is that by adopting so much of Estonia’s base technology, Ukraine has been able to catapult forward to now become a world leader in digital government, and all because they decided to lean into the lessons instead of the excuses (Canada I am looking at you). In fact, they are now starting to pull ahead of Estonia. While I was in Tallinn, I had a chance to connect with Yuliia Kravchenko, a Ukrainian who is now based in Estonia. Yuliia helped me do a bit of a compare-and-contrast between the Ukrainian government app Diia and the Estonian equivalent SCWD. Curious which one did better? Check out our video:

Across the water

After Tallinn, I took the ferry to Helsinki, arriving just in time for their biggest festival of the year: Midsummer Eve. Despite the fact that most of the country was on holiday, I still managed to sneak in a few key conversations: with Demos Helsinki, Sitra and a really inspiring Finnish public servant named Liisa Virolainen. The key question here was: how do we build a government for the future that is emerging?

A fair, sustainable, and joyful future

Demos Helsinki was my host in Finland; at the heart of its work is a commitment to building a future that is fair, sustainable, and joyful. That final word stayed with me. We do not often talk about joy in government. We talk about efficiency, productivity, delivery, risk, and compliance. Occasionally, when we are feeling adventurous, innovation. But joy?

The one person I am hearing a lot about joy in government from is my brother, David Alton, who is currently running for the mayor of Kitchener under the theme of building a Joyful City (check it out and if you live in Kitchener, make sure to vote for him this fall 😉)

(Vera and I recording our podcast interview in the Demos Helsinki office)

I had a chance to sit down with my friend Vera Djakonoff, who was the first person I met from Demos Helsinki many years ago on a boat at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival (yes, they have a boat at the festival; this is why you need to go next year). We unpacked my favourite work from Demos Helsinki, their work on ethos. Ethos is about the spirit of government. The values and culture that underpin and drive how government actually works. Demos Helsinki is trying to push government past an ethos grounded in the industrial age, based on efficiency, to one based on a 21st-century regenerative government.

Demos Helsinki identifies four qualities for a new public-service ethos: Humility. Collaboration. Imagination. Wisdom.

Humility means questioning our assumptions and recognizing the limits of our knowledge. Collaboration means bringing more of the system into the room. Government may be divided into departments and jurisdictions, but climate change, homelessness, and social inequality are not. Imagination means moving beyond optimization. Government spends a lot of time asking how to make the existing system slightly faster, cheaper, or more efficient. Imagination invites people to ask different questions and explore what is possible. Finally, wisdom means looking beyond the next announcement, budget, or election and thinking across generations. We celebrate governments for moving quickly. But speed and wisdom are not always the same thing.

It’s really fascinating work; you can read more here.

Making the future feel real

I also spent time with Sitra, the world-famous innovation foundation of the Finnish government. The part of its work that caught my attention was experiential futures. Most foresight work is a thought exercise; different activities designed to help imagine possible futures.

(Terhi and I laughing during our podcast interview in the Sitra office)

Experiential futures tries to make possible futures tangible. What would the future feel like? Smell like? Taste like? Sound like? I had a chance to sit down with Terhi Ylikoski and Onni Pekonen from the Sitra team and hear how they use simulations and fictional artifacts, including a magazine written from the future, to help people move from intellectually understanding a scenario to emotionally experiencing it.

That matters because there is a huge gap between knowing something might happen and feeling that it is real. We know climate change, AI, and aging populations will reshape our societies. But knowing is not always enough to produce action.

What if government was regenerative?

My third key conversation was with Liisa Virolainen, who is exploring regenerative government from within the public sector. Regenerative thinking is increasingly common in agriculture. A farmer can see what happens when you continually extract from the soil without restoring it. Eventually, the conditions that made production possible begin to collapse. But what would regenerative thinking mean for government? What if human flourishing was the central organizing principle of government? Government would not simply reduce harm but also help create the conditions for life to flourish. This all sounds great, but what does it look like in practice?

(Liisa and I enjoying the sun during our podcast interview)

One practical model Liisa helped develop is called the Ecosystem School. You begin with a shared problem. But instead of assigning it to one department, you bring the system into the room: government, businesses, communities, researchers, frontline workers, and people directly affected. Together, they build a shared understanding of the problem and ask: What is the future we actually want? Then they work backwards. If this is where we want to go, what does each part of the system need to do?

Governments talk a lot about systems change, but often still try to achieve it through individual programs, departments, and funding streams. The Ecosystem School starts from a more holistic position. They have already run six rounds of the school and are starting to see real results.

Naked Sauna’s

(Mikael sharing with me the wisdom of the sauna)

No trip to Finland is complete without a sauna. Mikael Sokero from Demos Helsinki took me to the Helsinki Sauna Club to teach me the art.

I will admit that the fully naked sauna took some adjusting to, but within five minutes, you forget all about it. Beyond being incredibly relaxing, I was struck by the camaraderie. There is a real sense of community.

There is something symbolic about everyone being naked together. Status and pretence fall away, allowing people to be more open and authentic. That vulnerability breeds trust.

Though perhaps the sauna’s strict no-work-talk policy helps too.

Two shores of the future

So what ties Estonia and Finland together? Estonia showed what becomes possible when a country makes a few bold choices and sticks with them. Build digital literacy. Create shared infrastructure. Allow people and knowledge to move across sectors. Treat digital transformation as a long-term national project.

Helsinki pushed the question forward. Once the digital foundations exist, what comes next? What ethos do public servants need? How do we help people imagine possible futures? What should government organize itself around?

The future of government is not just a technology problem. It is a cultural problem. An institutional problem. An imagination problem.

Where do we actually want to go?

Leg 2 of the tour is finally coming to an end. I am writing this on the bus home to Kitchener-Waterloo, wrapping up 6 weeks on the road that saw me dodge drones in Kyiv, build a movement in Berlin, sauna naked in Helsinki (blog coming next week) and attend the “Government Oscars” in Tbilisi.

Like the last leg, I spent the final week back in Canada dancing across the East Coast, seeing old friends and getting updates on the state of the public sector. The East Coast is one of my favourite parts of the country, combining natural beauty with some of the friendliest people you will ever meet.

I am so angry!

The East Coast was food for my soul. But if I am honest, the second emotion I felt on returning home was anger. After seeing all the cool things countries around the world were doing to make their governments better, I was angry that Canada didn’t seem interested in keeping up. I say interested because Canada has more resources and capacity than a lot of these other countries, so it very much feels like a choice not to do these things.

As soon as I say this, all the usual excuses come up: we are not centralized like many of these other countries, we are bigger, we have a more complex governance structure (i.e. federal/provincial), and we have all this legacy that gets in the way of doing new things. This just made me angrier. I am not saying any of these things are untrue, or that they don’t matter. I am saying I am tired of hearing them used as an excuse to keep things shit. How do we stop treating them as reasons not to act and instead turn them into things that help us excel?

My partner Olivia made me promise I wouldn’t rant; we already have a lot of anger in our country about our government, and what we need right now is not more anger for anger’s sake. But I keep coming back to the idea that anger is action that has not yet been realized. In that sense, it is far better than apathy. So the question is: how do we turn this anger into action? That is the question I am taking with me into my summer holidays.

Lessons from FWD50

I wrapped up leg 2 at my favourite event of the year: FWD50. For those not familiar, FWD50 is Canada’s preeminent conference on the future of government. It holds a special place for me because I got to be there at its birth many moons ago (thank you, Alex Benay). The dynamic sibling duo of Alistair and Rebecca Croll, along with their incredible team, have taken what started as a crazy idea and turned it into a key nexus for new ideas and practices in Canada. I collaborated with my friend Jordan Storozuk to vlog the event on Civic Punks Instagram; check it out.

This year’s speaker lineup was one of the strongest I can remember. Two talks really stood out for me:

From Scarcity to Abundance

To no one’s surprise, AI cast a big shadow over the event. People are wondering how it is going to change what government can do and how it will affect their work. But I think the biggest impact may have less to do with the technology itself and more to do with a paradigm shift in how we see the world and what is possible. Harper Reed captured this best when he talked about the shift from scarcity to abundance.

In government, where austerity mindset that seems to be everywhere right now, abundance is a radical minsdet. Harper pointed out that if you saw a business cutting staff, it would probably be a warning sign rather than a reason to invest. It signals a scarcity mindset: a lack of imagination about where growth and value might come from. Yes, AI can significantly increase capacity, but the response shouldn’t be to cut staff. It should be to unlock that capacity. Governments shouldn’t be cutting their people; they should be asking how to 10x what those people can do.

Put another way: why are we trying to get shitty outcomes faster and more cheaply? Shouldn’t the focus be on getting better outcomes? To quote Harper, “Chatbots are just a faster way to get to disappointment.”

Right now, around the world, people and countries are moving into defensive positions. All of a sudden, it seems like everyone is in a scarcity mindset. But we have never had more abundance. Harper challenged us to shift our own perspective: what would you do if you had an abundance of resources and capacity? For me, The Kindred Agency is a reminder of what this can look like; conveniently, they were also the sponsor for leg 2! Check out my interview with Kindred founder Olivia Dorey to learn more.

Experiment, experiment, experiment

I was really excited to finally meet Ian Montgomery in person. I have been an avid follower of his writing, and when I realized he is based in Montreal, not too far from me, I knew I wanted to connect. I have to say, as much as I enjoy his writing, he is even better in person. His talk covered a lot of ground, but if I had to boil it down, it would be simply: experiment, experiment, experiment. You can do all the research you want (and you should, where possible), but nothing teaches you as much as actually doing the thing. Things are going to break - that’s life. If you embrace that, build rapid feedback loops and adapt as you go, you get to better results faster.

A big part of that is getting comfortable with uncertainty. It is there anyway. Or to misquote a movie: “Uncertainty smiles at us all; all one can do is smile back.” We tend to present the successes and hide the failures, but that makes success almost impossible to learn from because the failures are often what got us there (Trying to model this, I wrote a failure report for leg 1, leg 2 is coming soon).

This is especially relevant in a world of AI. Instead of starting with “How do we use AI to do what we already do, only faster?”, Ian pushed us to ask what AI might enable people to do that they couldn’t do before. It connects back to Harper’s abundance point: new capacity should expand what is possible, not just make the old system cheaper. As Ian put it, “Most things you try will be forgettable. A few will be everything. You can’t tell which in advance.” And maybe my favourite line from his talk: “The bravest thing you can do with AI is notice you were wrong faster than your sunk costs want you to.” That feels like a useful operating principle well beyond AI.

I also really liked Ian’s story about HS2, the high-speed rail project planned to connect London with northern England. It has gone way over budget and is still years from completion, all while trying to save people 30 minutes on their journey. Ian’s deliberately cheeky provocation was that, for a fraction of the price, you could give everyone drinks and make the ride more enjoyable. The point wasn’t really the drinks. It was the question underneath: what are we actually trying to solve for here?

Ok, what’s next? Oh yes, of course. Next week I’ll do a bit of recapping from Estonia and Finland, two governments on the front edge of transformation. And yes, I stretched myself a bit to take part in the Finish tradition of naked saunas. Subscribe to learn more.

But first, some quick reflections:

One of the things I love about the UN Public Service Forum is who it chooses to platform. Unlike most other conferences I go to that focus on Western countries or other leading lights like Singapore, Japan and Korea. The key voices you hear are from emerging leaders like Uzbekistan, Nigeria and of course this years host, Georgia.

I partnered with the Government of Georgia to help vlog the week. This meant getting a co-host! I was very excited and honoured to be paired with Ana Tsuladze. You never know how you will match with someone, but immediately Ana and I vibed, and she made the experience 10x better. My user research on podcasting from the Creative Bureaucracy Festival had highlighted that people like having co-hosts because of the banter, and Ana was also able to bring in the Georgian perspective and serve as a cultural ambassador for my stay. It worked great, and I want to replicate this model more often with future adventures.

Public Service Hall

It’s one of those things you did not know you needed until you saw it.

That was how I felt visiting the Government of Georgia’s Public Service Hall. It is a place where people can access a huge range of government services in one location, and it was unlike anything I had experienced before.

First, the building itself is beautiful. It is nicknamed the “mushroom building,” because it looks like a clump of giant mushrooms. The architecture matters. It changes how the place feels. It makes the experience feel more open, more intentional, and less stale than the usual government office visit.

Inside, there are different ways to get help. You can use digital stations, go to service desks with actual people, or find the option that best fits what you need. There is even a lovely coffee shop where you can sit and sip hot chocolate while you wait. This felt very different from the Service Canada offices I have spent time in.

What struck me most, though, was the ambition behind it. Georgia is working to expand the number of services available through Public Service Hall—not just national government services, but local government services too. They are even exploring private sector services where those services connect to government processes.

Imagine that: government services across levels, gathered in one place, designed around the person trying to use them. Why does that feel like such a radical idea? Shouldn’t this just be normal?

Oscars For Government

The Oscars, and award shows like them, play a strange but important role in our culture. On the surface, they are about celebrating movies. But they also help know what movies to watch in a sea of content by telling us what is worth paying attention to. They humanize the people behind the work. They elevate the craft, create shared moments, and, at their best, are just fun.

I have often wondered what this would look like for government. After all, government shapes our daily lives far more than movies do. They determine the services we use, the infrastructure we rely on, the rights we have, and the systems we move through every day. So why do we not celebrate the best of government with the same energy?

I got a small taste of what that could look like — and, more importantly, what it could feel like — at the UN Public Service Awards. The room felt electric. People were cheering for real teams doing real work that mattered. I cheered as loudly as anyone when my friend Rafael and his team won for Brazil.

It made me wonder: how do we raise the profile of awards like this? How do we make the best work in government more visible, more celebrated, and more part of our shared culture? Maybe one day the UN Public Service Awards will feel as big as the Oscars. Honestly, why not?

Panel on Meaningful Participation

One of the highlights from my time in Georgia was the panel I got to moderate on meaningful participation, one of the central themes for the forum. I started by trying to get people to really sit with the feeling of being able to meaningfully participate in something because so often participation can be an intellectual exercise but for something to be meaningful, it is as much a feeling as it is an idea. I was paired with a fantastic group of panellists; here are some of my highlights through the voice of the panellists:

• Fadi Salem - “Understand who your most important (not easiest) audience is and design for (and with) them.”

• Ciata Stevens d’Almeida - “Meaningful Participation is not an outcome its an ongoing relationship”

• Joshua Ogure - “Empowerment breeds ownership breeds participation leading to better and more sustainable outcomes.”

You can see our whole panel here:

Over to Tamara

But to really understand the threads of the week, there is no person better than my friend Tamara, who served as the rapporteur for the week. So Tamara, over to you.

Thanks, Derek. Hi everyone, I’m Tamara, founder of Bokra Studio, a London-based design studio exploring the future of learning, particularly within public organisations. I had the pleasure of serving as the conference rapporteur this year, which meant synthesising not just what was said, but how people responded to it, across more than 20 sessions over three days. Easy, right?

There were so many moving moments along the way. One that stayed with me was hearing a farmer from the Thai highlands describe how he’d contributed to a 15-year participatory land-mapping effort through Map4All, leading to better outcomes for him, the land, and the government.

A few threads kept resurfacing across the rooms. One was that meaningful participation is relational (something brilliantly discussed during Derek’s panel), built through presence, listening, and showing up long before and long after a decision gets made. Governments often reach for brand-new participation platforms because they look like action, when the smarter move is usually to show up in the spaces and networks people already trust. Participation that is inclusive, representative, and trust-building costs more and takes longer. That’s not a reason to avoid it; it’s a reason to plan and resource for it properly. We explored those trade-offs in the simulation workshop I facilitated.

Inclusion also came up again and again, thankfully. One speaker put it in a way that really stayed with me: “Governments must measure not only reach, but who is excluded, who remains unserved, and who is at risk of being left behind again.”(Someone remind me who said that!)

What was really important was recognising that exclusion is evolving. We often think of exclusion as something that happens outside the system, when people can’t access a service in the first place. Increasingly, exclusion is happening inside the system itself. A biased algorithm can quietly cause harm at scale to people who aren’t represented in the data it was trained on, closing doors through flawed recommendations, biased shortlisting, or discrimination embedded in code. We need to understand these new vectors of harm and design against them deliberately.

AI surfaced in almost every room and every conversation. I’ll leave you with a short excerpt from my closing reflections that seemed to resonate with many people in the audience:

*”As artificial intelligence moves into the work of government, into the systems and services that shape people’s lives, the question we must refuse to stop asking is not what can AI do, but how does AI help us become more human? As a species, we have a troubled history with this. We are handed technologies of extraordinary promise and, with alarming consistency, find ways to make them cold, extractive, or cruel. We do not have to do that this time. What if, instead, we asked: how does AI give us more time to sit with people, to actually listen? How does it help us spot someone who is struggling, quietly, invisibly, before they fall through the cracks of a vast and complicated system? How do we, for once, centre our humanity inside our technology, rather than let technology hollow out our humanity?”

Thank you, Tamara. You can watch Tamara’s whole reflection; check it out below (Note: sorry the video starts a few seconds into her speech; you also get to hear the first minute of Ana and my follow-up)

Ultimately, the real gift of this gathering (like all gatherings) is the people and the relationships you build. I am not sure how many will continue forward and how many people I will meet again, but for these few days together we have bonded and been human together in the best way. We leave changed and inspired.

Next, I am in Montreal, Canada for my favourite future of government gatherings and one that holds a very special place in my heart: FWD50. I will continue to vlog my journey, so make sure to subscribe to Civic Punks on Instagram to follow along.

Warm Regards,

Derek

God, I have rewritten this newsletter so many times! How do you follow up the powerful experiences from Kyiv last week? You can’t, really. So I will say from the start that this newsletter will not be as powerful as the last one, but hopefully it will still make you pause and think.

After a whirlwind week in Kyiv and Warsaw, I found myself back in familiar territory: a few days in London, where I lived for five years, and then off to Berlin for one of my favourite events of the year, the Creative Bureaucracy Festival.

The theme for this past week has been a deep reflection on building the movement for government transformation. This is a topic I have been thinking and writing about for a long time. I want to focus on three elements in particular: storytelling, events and informal networks. And to help frame this, I want to start with my conversation with the irrepressible Catherine Day.

One of the highlights of the week was heading way out to Axminster in South West England to spend some time with Catherine at her beautiful country home. It is way out there (it took me four trains), and I recklessly decided to visit the same weekend I decided to play football with my old crew in St Albans, which is very much in the opposite direction. So I spent most of the weekend on trains. But it was worth it!

Aside from watching the England football match with the family, I had a chance to sit down with Catherine and really dig into her work with the National Strategy Project. More than simply a national dialogue on the future of the UK, this is an ambitious project designed to use dialogue and networks to help forge a new form of democracy and governance that better fits the age we live in. At the heart of it are four pillars:

• Shared knowledge — building a common trusted knowledge base about the state of the country that we can act from.

• Deliberative dialogue — creating healthy and productive ways for us to engage with each other around the issues in our communities.

• Strategy — taking all this information in and use it to carve out pathways towards our common goals.

• Action — enabling everyone to be involved in building the future of the UK.

What I found useful about these pillars is that they are not just abstract ideas. They describe the basic work of movement building too.

Shared knowledge does not appear from nowhere. It is built through stories that help us make sense of what is happening. Deliberative dialogue needs places where people can gather, listen, disagree, and think together. That is where events matter. And strategy only really becomes action when it moves through relationships — the informal networks, WhatsApp groups, side conversations, friendships, and loose coalitions that keep things moving after everyone leaves the room.

I want to use these three themes of storytelling, events and informal networks to help frame the rest of this newsletter.

Storytelling

I spent a lot of this week telling stories. It started almost as soon as I landed. I met up with my good friends David Durant and Gavin Freeguard, who were eager to hear about my adventures. Same with a bunch of my ex-Apolitical colleagues the next night, and again at an event I hosted at TPX on Monday (my first ever YouTube Live).

Each time, the story evolved as I got better at telling it. It also helped me reflect and deepen my own understanding of the experience. There is something about sharing a story out loud, watching what lands, feeling where people lean in, to help you understand how to share your stories (kinda like a comedian practicing their material).

Stories matter because they help a movement understand itself. They carry lessons, build shared identity, and give people something to gather around. Strong movements need strong stories, and good storytellers.

So who are our storytellers? I actually think we have many, as shown by the vibrancy of many of our LinkedIn feeds. Some of my current favourites include Geoff Mulgan and James Plunkett out of the UK, Jennifer Pahlka from the US, and Rebecca Mbaya, who is doing a wonderful series on public sector innovation across Africa.

I am also re-listening to the Revolutions podcast series (fourth time through) and have been amazed by the power of key publications to drive revolutions forward. Whether it was pamphlets by people like Thomas Paine (much like the modern Substack or Medium) or newspapers like The Boston Gazette, printed by Benjamin Franklin’s brother James. We have a couple of key publications here too. I am an avid reader of Civil Service World in the UK, GovInsider in Singapore, and The Mandarin in Australia and New Zealand.

Though I think text is a powerful medium, it is increasingly being replaced by video and audio through platforms like YouTube, Instagram and podcasts. The problem is that our storytellers just aren't there yet, and we need to be if we want to stay relevant and engage the new generations who are really going to drive this movement forward.

So who are the storytellers in these new mediums?

This past week I really focused on podcasting. A couple of months ago, I started mapping all the government-focused podcasts I could find (please add to it) and was pleasantly surprised to find there are a bunch. But they often lack reach and, if I am honest, polish (myself very much included). The field is still in its early, figuring-itself-out phase.

Yet this is the vanguard of the new storytellers who are going to drive our movement forward. So what do we do?

Jose Mendoza from Futuro Publico and I have been working to create a Global Public Service Podcast Network, with the goals of increasing reach through cross-promotion and improving quality through a community of practice to hone and advance our skills. We used the Creative Bureaucracy Festival as a convening point, pulling together six different podcasts to co-host a live radio show from the festival grounds.

It was a great chance to connect and learn from each other, while also deepening our bond through a collective project. There were definitely kinks, but Alberto Wurst (also from Futuro Publico) was an absolute maestro (talk about a funny spelling of a word; English is weird) with the technology. It also gave me a chance to meet Paul Bellows from the 311 podcast and Bengisu Berispek from Shift Z. Jason Pearman from the Public Practice (formerly GovMaker podcast) also hosted a great discussion with a group of us about lessons learned from podcasting.

Jose and I also hosted a focus group on a boat. Yes, that’s right. The Creative Bureaucracy Festival is always doing interesting things. While touring the river, we explored with ten randomly selected people what makes for great podcasts.

My two biggest takeaways were: first, hosts really matter. People follow podcasts for the hosts as much as the content, and people actually really like two hosts because of the banter between them. Second, consistency and regularity are really important (oh crap) because a podcast becomes part of the routine and rhythm of our lives. Ok, so I am going to need to work on this last one. Being able to pre-schedule posts will help…

Earlier in the week, I had a chance to grab coffee with Jack Aldane from Global Government Forum. Jack shares my passion for podcasts. He liked the idea of the network, but there is always the question of competition between podcasts. We live in an attention economy. There are limits to how much time people have.

I like to think of it like sports (I love a good sports analogy). Teams are competing with each other, and that competition makes them both better. But they are also collaborating to grow the sport, get more people watching and engaging. I think the same is true with podcasting. Besides, most people learn about a podcast from another related podcast.

The bigger question, though, is how to build a sustainable business model. Let’s be honest: basically all podcasts in the nerdy gov space are labours of love. But if we want to grow the space, we need to change this.

Part of that is about increasing our reach significantly, because this opens up advertising dollars. But this takes time and work, and honestly none of us are really that close. In the meantime, I think there is an opportunity to pair podcasts with events as a way of capturing and sharing insights.

Many events spend thousands of dollars on slick, if sometimes shallow, videos from their events. Podcasts are more authentic and real. They bring much more of a human element, which makes them sticky, and they can be consumed in both video and audio. We are going to keep noodling on this, but my goal is to come up with viable business models to help grow the space (always welcome ideas).

Events

I have long advocated for events as essential to growing movements. They serve all sorts of purposes, but at their best they do two things: they give the movement a formal reason to gather, and they create the informal conditions for people to connect, bond and become a community.

I think the best events mix a formal part, which draws people in and gives them something concrete to take away and share, with an informal part, which forges bonds and connections. That social fibre is the lifeblood of any movement.

We always say the most interesting and important parts of events happen in the margins and informal settings. But likewise, the formal part is needed to ensure people take time to come. It is the draw.

An example of this is the Lessons from Civic Punks event that I did at TPX Impact in London. The formal part was the talk: lessons from the tour so far. The informal part was going to the pub after, where we talked long into the night.

No one does this blend better than the Creative Bureaucracy Festival (CBF), one of my all-time favourite events. I have been a regular there for the last four years. Unlike other events, where you know you are there for work, at CBF you can forget yourself and get lost in play.

The way they do it is to think like an onion. Like ogres, CBF has layers. At the centre you have formal stages that blend inspiring talks from big speakers (the debate that Lisa Witter hosts is my ultimate favourite part) and case studies.

The next layer is workshops and discussions, more interactive spaces where you shift from observer to participant. By the time you get to the outer layer, you find yourself outside sitting in deck chairs, eating ice cream and listening to live music. They also sprinkle in all sorts of little activities that invoke a sense of play, such as the classic pub quiz or the photobooth.

The other gift of CBF is what I would call Fringe CBF: all the events that are organized around the main festival. The two reinforce each other. People take advantage of the gravity of the festival, and the people it brings, to hold important side conversations, planning sessions and socials. Those in turn add value to attending CBF.

A great example of this is the States of Change retreat that is held the day before. States of Change is this incredible network of leaders in public sector innovation who are collaborating to grow the field and increase governments’ capacity for innovation. Spread around the globe, CBF has for the last two years served as an opportunity for the network to come together, learn, and explore how to grow their impact.

For the last two years, I have somehow managed to be a fly on the wall. This year I even got to present on what I have been seeing through this Civic Punks world tour. The discussions then fed into CBF the next day, where many States of Change members graced the stages.

The States of Change network is figuring out how to grow while continuing to keep the deep bonds and intimacy that it currently has. This is the challenge of any movement. You need to grow and expand to increase impact and power (and also to bring in new generations), while at the same time it is the depth of relationships that drives engagement and action.

In Mennonite churches (I am Mennonite, in case you didn’t know), congregations usually average between 40 and 70 people. Once they get to the bigger side, they inevitably split in two to maintain the intimacy of relationship that is so core to the Mennonite faith and identity. This moves things from a community to a network of communities.

Events serve as a chance for that network of communities to come together, reassert their bonds and identity, share learnings, and celebrate. Then the network disperses back into its communities, where the real action happens.

That is the power of events.

CBF serves as a space for the network of communities to come together, deepen our connection, grow, create new shared memories, and rekindle the fire before we go back home and continue to work, renewed and refreshed.

Informal networks

This network of communities is like the mycelium networks that exist underground in forests and serve as the lifeblood that allows a forest to thrive. They are usually hidden and rarely formalized, but without them the forest dies. They exist in the informal places. One of the places I see this happening in our movement is through WhatsApp.

For example, we have created an unofficial and informal WhatsApp group for CBF. Going to an event for the first time can be isolating if you don’t know anyone. At the same time, experiencing an event as a community is rich and powerful.

So this WhatsApp group helps connect people to each other. It helps with coordination as we set up informal meetups or just share the fringe events that are happening. It also serves as a place of support as we cheer each other on through talks and workshops. We share pictures. It has become an incredibly powerful space for deepening the impact of the experience. We have been recycling the same WhatsApp group over the years, so people from past years who are not around still get to live vicariously through the rest of us.

I set one of these up a few years ago for an event and now I am obsessed with them. I create them for most big conferences I go to, especially if I know a bunch of people who are going.

Another great example came from a conversation I had this week with Diarmaid Crean, who used to be a senior leader within the UK health service (NHS). He shared the story of how he one day stumbled upon an informal WhatsApp group for health practitioners across the country. The more he looked into it, the more fascinated he became.

Created out of an event (see events are so key), the WhatsApp group served as a place for practitioners to share information, make sense of the sometimes confusing directives coming from the top, and share experiments and innovations. Diarmaid realized that this group was a far better indicator of how things would actually be implemented on the ground.

It reflected the diversity of contexts and enabled sharing way better than anything set up centrally. Its informal nature allowed people to be far more candid, which allowed information to travel faster and with greater clarity.

I too am incredibly interested in these informal networks. I spent three and a half years at Apolitical trying to figure out how to better support and scale them. I am not sure we ever figured it out.

Anywho, this ended up being longer than I expected, so I think I will end here.

Oh, before I end, I know I have been neglecting my YouTube channel recently; it has been hard to find time on the tour, though I have been posting regularly on Instagram (make sure to follow). But I did finally carve out time to post the interview I did with my favourite Civic Punk from Japan, Chika Masuda, so make sure to check it out:

Next week (or rather this week, since I am behind on this newsletter) I will be visiting one of the most talked-about digital governments in the world, Estonia, before taking the ferry to Helsinki to learn from Demos Helsinki and Sitra. Lots of exciting stuff to come!

Oh yes, and make sure to like, subscribe and share with others. It really does make a difference.

I am writing this one on the train from Kyiv to Warsaw. I am also going to deviate from my usual format and write it more like a personal travel journal. I hope you don’t mind. I think it fits what I want to say better.

I thought I would start this leg with a bang — literally, as it turned out — and go to Ukraine.

Many people told me I was crazy to go to a war zone. How right they turned out to be. But honestly, I would be crazy not to go. You can’t talk about exploring the future of government and not go to Ukraine. In the last five years, Ukraine has skyrocketed from 102nd to 5th in the UN e-government rankings — basically pulling a reverse Canada, but on steroids.

How? What is happening in Ukraine?

I had to go find out. Thankfully, I had lots of friends to help.

But how does one travel to a war zone?

I decided to vlog the journey on the new Civic Punks Instagram.

First, you need special insurance. Normal travel insurance does not cover war zones. Luckily, the Ukrainian government is eager to help, though I lost count of how many messages I received along the way telling me that travel to Ukraine was not recommended.

Next, you can’t fly there. The airspace is closed. So you fly into Warsaw and then take an overnight train in. It was my first time on a sleeper train.

Turns out, I was the only non-Ukrainian on the train into Kyiv. Then the train broke down for ten hours, causing me to miss my first day of meetings.

I finally arrived on the evening of Monday, June 1st, into the warm embrace of my friend and host, Luke Cavanagh, who had come to meet me at the train station. Luke works for the Tony Blair Institute in Kyiv. He also runs Interweave, a great newsletter on digital government transformation, and organizes GovMesh, a regular retreat for digital government leaders, with my Singapore host, Yogesh. The eagle-eyed Civic Punk might also recognize Luke as the Europe rep on my Global Government Innovation Panel.

Luke and one of his housemates, Adrian, a war correspondent for CBS, then gave me the pep talk about what to expect living through a war zone.

That turned out to be useful, because Monday night was particularly violent.

We were woken up at 2 a.m. by a loud explosion not far from us. The guidance is to make your way to the closest bomb shelter, which for us was the local subway station around the corner. But like most Ukrainians, we instead moved to the centre of the building, to a room with no windows.

Higher risk, yes. But also more convenient. And when this happens often, convenience eventually wins out.

Luke quickly pulled up a Telegram channel run by the Ukrainian military, which gives detailed breakdowns of what to expect. They have enough surveillance and sensors to tell what is on its way to Kyiv. Luckily, our neighbourhood was not a target, but the missiles kept falling across the city, each explosion echoing through the city.

It was terrifying. There is also a strange camaraderie in huddling together, praying your building does not get hit, while doom-scrolling Telegram channels for updates.

After the missiles came the drones, with their distinct buzzing, far more ominous than the recreational drones back home. Then came the rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft guns spaced across the city, followed by explosions as drones either hit their mark or were taken out.

Needless to say, none of us got much sleep.

The next morning, the sun rose, and it was a beautiful day, as if the night before had never happened. Even though more than 30 people had died in the attack.

But I am not a war correspondent. I went to Ukraine to explore the future of government that they are building.

First on my list was Kateryna Frovalov, the head of the Global Government Technology Centre – Kyiv. GGTC-Kyiv is part of a World Economic Forum-supported global network focused on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a lot of fancy words for a network of organizations laying the groundwork for the future economy and society. I had already met the heads of the Malaysian and German leads earlier in my travels, so I was excited to see what the Kyiv office was building.

When I met Kateryna, I was exhausted from not getting much sleep. But then again, we were all in the same boat. It became the opening check-in for every meeting that day: How was your night? Rough one, eh? Glad you are safe.

The Kyiv office is doing lots of interesting work, but we focused mostly on their new innovation lab. The goal is to bring together entrepreneurs, startups, and governments to solve social problems creatively.

Politicians everywhere talk about supporting small and medium-sized local businesses, but this rarely moves beyond election-speak. The reality is that it is really hard for governments and entrepreneurs to work together. Small organizations can struggle to deliver reliably. Governments can struggle to follow through on commitments. And procurement rules often get in the way before anyone even starts.

I asked Kateryna about this. She acknowledged that procurement had been their biggest hurdle as well, but said they were finding creative ways to work within the rules that already existed. She also emphasized the importance of having the problem owner in the room from the start, already bought into the project. The failure to scale pilots is one of the biggest critiques of government innovation labs. That buy-in is key to overcoming it.

The project is still in its early days, so the real test is yet to come. Still, it shows a lot of promise. One reason is a uniquely Ukrainian thing: they are at war, so there is a strong drive to make this work.

My next meeting was with the CIO for the City of Kyiv. I had time, so I decided to make the one-hour walk between locations and see more of the city.

Quite by chance, I turned a corner and found myself facing complete devastation.

I had stumbled onto the site of one of the major attacks from the night before. Several buildings were bombed out. Glass and debris were everywhere. Cars were crushed, their tires blown. Basically every window in the area was shattered.

To my surprise, the street was full of people, especially given that the air sirens were going off and my alert app was warning me of impending drone strikes. Still, people seemed to be walking around as if it were any other day. Some were taking pictures. Others were taking in the scene. Tents had been set up to support people whose homes had been damaged in the blast.

Then I heard the buzzing of a drone.

At first, people kept walking as if it were nothing. Then it got closer. All of a sudden, people started running for cover. I followed them inside. Just as I entered the doorway of a nearby building, the drone struck the building across the road with a loud blast. The shockwave pushed me through the doorway.

Holy shit, that was close.

Inside, the building was full of people. Many were crying. Kids were huddled up with their mum.

The human toll of this war came sharply into focus. No one should have to live like this. War is an awful abomination of human power. Why we do this to each other? I will never understand.

I eventually made it to my meeting with the CIO for the City of Kyiv, Victoria Itskovych. Victoria is a big fan of F1 and gaming, which is clear from her office decorations. She told me the story of the early days of the war, and it read like a nerdy government adventure novel.

On the night of the first attack, she immediately got dressed and headed not to the office, but to the data centre. I asked her why, and she said she figured that was where she could do the most good.

It ended up being six weeks before she and her team slept in their own beds. Instead, they camped out at the data centre, air mattresses everywhere, working through the night week after week.

So often, the story of Ukraine is one of a government being forced by war to take an archaic system and rapidly turn it into one of the most advanced digital governments in the world. That may be the story of the national government, but it is not the story Victoria told me about the City of Kyiv.

Before the war, Kyiv already had a fairly robust and trusted app — she emphasized trusted — used by more than a million people. At the time, it was mainly used for parking and transit.

In the first week of the war, they quickly repurposed it for the emergency. The city had an aging Soviet-era air siren system that was not fit for the present war, so they created a digital warning system — the one I would use during my trip — that gave live updates to people wherever they were. Then came shelters: an interactive tool to help people find the closest place of safety.

After a week, they realized the data centre, sitting in a government building, was likely an obvious target. So under the cover of night, they moved the most important parts of it to an underground parking garage. Something that would usually take weeks, if not months, of careful planning was done in a wild couple of hours, using people’s cars and whatever else they could get their hands on.

The lesson is simple: when you already have a robust and trusted digital system in place, you can pivot much more quickly in a crisis. In Kyiv, that literally saved lives.

That evening, I hosted a Civic Punks social. It was a chance to meet a bunch of civic punks in Kyiv.

It is amazing that, in the middle of a war, you can still have a thriving nightlife. We sat on a patio at a trendy bar called Squat 17B. I may as well have been in Berlin or Paris.

I noticed a pattern among the people there. Many had been working in the private sector, living abroad, in careers with real promise and upward mobility. When the war started, they left those comfortable lives to come home and be part of the defence effort.

There was a deep sense of patriotism and civic duty that any country would dream of having. A steely resolve to face the threat and come out stronger. These people could leave for safety. They chose to stay.

Afterward, my friend Denys Nazarenko, who is a senior advisor to the CIO of Kyiv and helped set up the meeting with Victoria, took me on a tour of the city. I was exhausted and therefore a bit grouchy — sorry, Denys. But even in that state, it was impossible not to see the beauty of Kyiv, a city rich in history and architecture, two things I absolutely love.

Tuesday night was mercifully quiet. Still, despite my exhaustion, I slept restlessly. Every little noise woke me up. I imagined more missiles landing.

War traumatizes you. It is a heavy weight that sits on your chest, even when you are only visiting for a couple of days. You never feel safe.

I experienced this for two days. The people here have carried it for years.

The next morning, I managed to secure a meeting with the new head of AI for the government of Ukraine, Roman Kyslyi. Ukraine is leading the charge on the Agentic State — basically redesigning government around AI agents — so I was particularly excited for this discussion.

Over the last few years, Ukraine has built an incredible cohort of people who have driven its digital transformation under the leadership of Mykhailo Fedorov at the Ministry of Digital Transformation. A few months ago, Fedorov moved to Defence and brought many of this cohort with him. It has paid immediate dividends and is likely one of the reasons for Ukraine’s recent success on the battlefield. But it has also left a big gap at the ministry, now being filled by a new cohort. Roman is part of that group.

He has a deep background in AI and is part of a community focused on Ukrainian AI sovereignty. They started by trying to solve the lack of Ukrainian language and culture in the data that AI models were being trained on. Over time, as AI increasingly becomes the lens through which we make sense of the world, this can erode culture and identity. The Singaporeans call this a risk to cognitive sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty more broadly has become a hot topic, as the world wakes up to the reality that most digital infrastructure is run and managed by American companies, and that the U.S. government is increasingly willing to use this leverage over other countries. This creates a major risk. But it is also a hard problem to fix.

I had a conversation with fellow Canadian David Eaves about this last fall. David is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject. As he told me while we walked in circles around the park outside his office at University College London, this infrastructure has been built over decades with billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of investment, the world’s leading experts, a ton of data centres, and enormous amounts of energy.

There is no country, aside from maybe the European Union (maybe) that is even close to replicating this.

So I put the question to Roman: what does AI sovereignty look like when the underlying infrastructure is so hard to recreate?

His answer had two parts.

First, lean into open source. Public code can be shared, improved, and reused by people around the world. Many of us in the tech and digital transformation space have long advocated for open source, particularly in government. Public dollars should go toward public assets.

Second, as we move from LLMs — the AI chatbots we are all used to, like ChatGPT — to AI agents, the scope becomes more focused. You only need the data related to the task you want the agent to do. That becomes much more manageable.

This is really interesting, though I still think it leaves a lot of the digital sovereignty questions outstanding.

Roman went further. He sees a future where each of us carries our own unique context in data that sits on our phone and computer. That becomes the base for our own personal AI agent to work from.

Afterward, I took some time to walk around the city, including a sobering visit to Independence Square, with its massive memorial to all the people who have sacrificed their lives in the war.

Then I met Daryna Varenyk. Daryna represents the future of Ukraine.

Her core passion is getting young people excited to work in government, a passion I share. She is launching a podcast that pairs a young person — say someone studying AI — with someone who has been working in the field for a long time, like Roman. The podcast is a recording of their conversation.

Brilliant model. I am really excited to listen to it. It will be in Ukrainian, so I will need to figure out some way to translate it. But hey, that is what technology is for.

Her day job is with the Better Regulation Delivery Office, or BRDO. This organization was created to solve a problem governments everywhere have: it is really hard to hire the top talent you need. Government pay often cannot compete with the private sector, and the hiring process is long and labour-intensive.

Effectively, BRDO functions like a consulting firm that specializes in government. But where many consulting firms are extractive, building relationships of dependency that keep governments coming back (Mariana Mazzucato wrote a whole book about this dynamic called The Big Con) BRDO works to build capacity.

It is effectively a pan-government body, sitting outside the usual hiring rules but close enough to meet the need. I would argue that fixing the hiring rules is the ultimate solution, but this is a good workaround in a crisis.

Still, it points to a pattern I see a lot: instead of fixing the rules that create problems in government — procurement, hiring, or otherwise — we build workarounds outside of government because changing the rules feels too hard.

The trip was less than 48 hours, but it packed a lot. So what did I take away?

This might be my Mennonite roots talking, but war is awful. Just awful. I would argue it is almost never justified. It makes monsters of us all and causes incredible suffering, and for what?

The deep fear on the faces of the people in that building is imprinted on my mind, matched by my own terror in that moment.

Everyone I met has been personally affected by the war. Many have lost family and friends. On the train ride in, one of my cabin mates told me in graphic detail about the torture her boyfriend experienced after being captured while fighting on the front lines. She herself had left a cushy job with Accenture in Austria to do her part for the war effort, working in military tech.

This country is full of people with incredible resilience and determination. But as Kateryna was quick to point out, she is tired of people saying this.

“We are just human. And we are tired. Tired of all of this.”

I came to Ukraine looking for the future of government. In a whirlwind 48 hours, I left changed in ways I did not expect. I was moved at levels I did not know I could be.

I will be back. Hopefully when the war is over, to help capture the rebirth of an incredible country with a deep and beautiful soul.

Next stop, a taste of the familiar - London.

Over the last month, I’ve been sharing my thinking behind how Civic Punks is evolving (both content and business). This is the last in that series before I hit the road again. This newsletter is focused on where I am going next and why.

In less than a week, I’ll be hopping on a plane and heading to Europe to keep exploring the future of government through the people, places, and projects trying to build it. And my first stop is…

Kyiv!

Why Ukraine?

If you want to understand the future of government, you have to pay attention to Ukraine.

What the Ukrainian government has done over the last five years around digital transformation is nothing short of a miracle, and one of the most interesting government transformation stories in the world.

In the midst of a war, they have catapulted up the UN e-government rankings (jumping 52 spots). With their citizens either sheltering in place or dispersed around the world, they have redesigned to be a fully digital government, all while under attack from one of the most advanced cyber armies in the world.

And now, with Ukraine’s work on the Agentic State, they are also pushing into one of the next big frontiers: how AI agents might reshape the relationship between people and the state.

So yes, I am excited but also a bit nervous. Travelling into a war zone is not something I take lightly. But I keep coming back to the same thought:

If Civic Punks is about going where the future of government is being built, then I would be crazy not to go.

A quick thank you — and some big news

Before I get into the rest of the route, I want to say thank you.

Last week, I talked about a few ways people could help make Civic Punks sustainable. A few of you joined the Punk Brigade on Patreon. A few of you sent one-off contributions through Buy Me a Coffee. Every one of those means a lot. And if you’ve been thinking about supporting Civic Punks, now is your chance.

Civic Punks also has its first leg sponsor.

Leg Two is being supported by Olivia Dorey and the Grace Project.

This is especially meaningful because Olivia has been part of this project from before it was even Civic Punks. Back in the summer of 2019, Olivia and I had breakfast together and started scheming about a project called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Good Government. It was the first version of this idea, cut short by the pandemic. Olivia was the first person in then. And when I started building Civic Punks, she was the first person in again not just by building the Civic Punks website, but also by being my first Patreon supporter. Beyond that, she has been a constant advisor, sounding board, and source of encouragement as I’ve tried to figure out how to make this thing real. And once again, Olivia is the first to be a leg sponsor for Civic Punks with her Grace Project.

It is also a great fit for this leg. The Grace Project is exploring how agentic AI can support caregivers and people on the front lines of government service delivery, bridging between the people trying to help and the people who need support. In exchange for this support, I will be helping the Grace Project team by digging into Ukraine’s Agentic State work, Estonia’s Bürokratt, and other examples of how governments are experimenting with AI agents in public service contexts.

I’m really excited about this. And deeply grateful to Olivia for helping make this leg possible.

If your organization is interested in sponsoring a future leg, I would love to talk. Sponsors help make the fieldwork possible, and in return get a more direct window into what I’m seeing on the ground: the projects, patterns, people, tensions, and questions that are starting to matter. You can email me at derekalton@civicpunks.com.

Where I’m going

After Kyiv, I’ll head to London.

This will be a chance to reconnect with old friends and plug into some interesting work happening in the UK. I’ll be spending time with Catherine Day and the National Strategy Project, which is exploring how the UK might build a clearer vision for where it wants to go next. I’ll also be spending time with the legendary Behavioural Insights Team to learn more about what they are seeing and doing on the ground.

From there, I’m heading to Berlin for the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, which has become one of the big gathering points for people trying to make public institutions more imaginative, useful, and alive. I’ll be joining a group of fellow podcasters from around the world to run a full-day radio show from the festival. While in Berlin, I’ll also spend time with the States of Change network, which brings together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in this space. And I’m hoping to dig into what Germany is doing with its new digital government unit.

Then I’m heading to Tallinn. Because, of course, Estonia. Estonia has been one of the world’s reference points for digital government for a long time. Everyone points to it, but I want to better understand what actually made it possible and where they are going next.

From there, I’ll go to Helsinki to spend time with my friends at Demos Helsinki. Finland has been doing some of the most thoughtful work I know around the future ethos of public service. Not just how government uses technology, but what kind of public service mindset we need for the world we are entering.

And finally, I’ll wrap up this leg in Tbilisi, Georgia, for the UN Public Service Forum.

A fitting endpoint because it widens the lens beyond the usual digital government suspects. I’m excited to explore what public sector innovation looks like in Georgia and across emerging economies, where the constraints are different, the stakes are high, and the ideas are often much more interesting than the usual conference circuit gives them credit for.

So that is the route:

Kyiv. London. Berlin. Tallinn. Helsinki. Tbilisi.

A casual little wander through some of the most interesting places shaping the future of government in Europe. To stay connected to these adventures, remember to subscribe to Civic Punks on Instagram for behind-the-scenes rough notes, to YouTube for videos on the core concepts and ideas, the podcast for deep dive interviews and of course here on Substack for the broader patterns from the week.

What I posted this week

Everyone is talking about AI in government. But what do we actually mean when we say “AI”? In this conversation, I sit down with Robbie Slape, who works with the Australian Government and is helping lead some of its AI strategy work. Robbie describes AI as a kind of “suitcase” — a term people carry around, often packed with very different assumptions, hopes, fears, and definitions.

We also talk about AI CoLab, a community meetup bringing together public servants, private sector folks, entrepreneurs, and researchers who are trying to learn how AI can be used for public purpose. It is a place not just of experimentation but also of community.

What I loved about this conversation is that it is not really just about technology. It is about how people learn together, experiment together, and find the support they need to think differently inside large systems.

In March, I had a chance to go to Singapore to take part in GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation. I collaborated with my friend Si Ying Thian to conduct a series of interviews from the festival floor. Now, finally, I am starting to release them. The first couple of interviews cover topics like:

• what being in a Unicorn can teach us about running pilots in government,

• and why we need more women working in Digital Public Infrastructure.

More interviews coming this week.

Other interesting things from the field

• Book: Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott - an older book that has popped up in a couple of conversations this week and seems as timely as ever.

• Article: Flood warning: How citizens’ AI agents will swamp public services by Tom Loosemore

• Podcast: Smart dissent: middle management - The Westminster Tradition podcast

• Government of Canada Guide on the Use of Agentic Artificial Intelligence

• Article: When AI is Fluent in Data but Illiterate in Context by Rebecca Mbaya

See you next week

Next week, I will be writing my newsletter from Kyiv itself as I kick off the beginning of the Europe Leg of the Civic Punks world tour. This is a good time to check out the Civic Punks on Instagram for the behind-the-scenes reflections of the tour.

Warm Regards,

Derek

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sharing more of the thinking behind where Civic Punks is heading. First, I wrote a failure report from the front lines. A cheerful little tour through some recent mistakes. Then last week, I wrote about how I’m rethinking the content itself. More signal, less noise. More intentionality about what goes where and why.

This week, I want to talk about the question I get asked the most: How do I actually fund Civic Punks?

So… how are you going to fund Civic Punks?

One of the main goals for this year is to figure out how to make a project like Civic Punks sustainable. Not just because I don’t want to keep pulling from my savings, but because I want more people to be able to do this work.

Here is the engine that I think drives this work:

1. It all starts with relationships — meaningful, authentic ones.

2. Relationships create access.

3. This access then leads to insights.

4. Insights are then packaged into engaging, real and fun content.

5. Those things build trust and credibility, which then turn into opportunities.

6. And hopefully, those opportunities create revenue and deeper relationships.

Why access matters

Because of the relationships I’ve built over nearly two decades in this space, I get to talk to interesting people, visit cool projects, attend unusual events, and see parts of the future-of-government world that are often hidden from view.

And because I’m willing to actually show up — to travel, to be in the room, to have the hallway conversation, to sit in the pub afterwards, to help move bookshelves, Rodger, I am looking at you — I get to ask different kinds of questions and have conversations that go beyond the surface. That kind of access is hard to replicate from behind a desk. Or with AI.

So the job of Civic Punks is to take that access and turn it into something useful, shareable, human, and hopefully fun (not work). Content that helps people see what is actually happening in this field.

So, with that in mind, how do we fund it?

The four paths I’m exploring

Right now, I’m thinking about four main paths.

1) Events

This is the one that is already starting to work, and I want to give a shoutout to the Public Sector Network and UN DESA for experimenting with me on this.

The idea is to help tell the story of an event from the human level. A pre-game show, like in sports, to frame why the event matters and what storylines to pay attention to. On-the-ground interviews, hallway conversations, short dispatches, and reflections from the conference floor. Then a post-game reflection on what actually mattered.

The point is to find the signal in all the noise.

Most events produce content. But a lot of it feels more like branding than storytelling. It misses the soul of the thing. And in an age of AI, I think we need more soul, not less.

So event storytelling is about helping the energy, insight, and relationships in the room travel beyond the room. Especially when not everyone has the budget or time to be there in person.

There is also an event design piece here. Because Civic Punks is out in the field, talking to people across this space, I start to get a sense of what people are actually thinking about. What tensions are emerging. What topics are getting stale. What conversations might this field need next.

And also, very practically, how do we get people doing more than sitting quietly in rows, checking their phones?

Speakers and panels have a place. I love moderating panels. But there are so many other ways to build connection and learning: serious games, scenarios, open space, dynamic workshops, field visits, and small-group conversations.

So that is path one: helping events feel more human, more useful, and more alive.

2) Sensemaking

A lot of what I’m doing already is pattern recognition. I’m talking to people across government, civic tech, public sector innovation, digital transformation, service design, policy, institutional reform, and a bunch of other fields that all have slightly different approaches to help make government work better.

And over time, patterns start to show up. You hear the same tensions in different contexts. You notice which ideas are travelling and which ones are not. You see where people are excited. Where they are stuck. Where the public conversation does not quite match the private one.

That is valuable.

Because a lot of teams are trying to understand these shifts. But no one has time to be everywhere. So the idea is pretty simple. An organization says: Here are the questions we are wrestling with. Then I go into the field with those questions in mind. I attend events. I interview people. I visit projects. I collect signals. And then I come back with a briefing.

• Here is what I’m hearing.

• Here are the tensions that keep coming up.

• Here are the projects you should know about.

• Here are the people you should be talking to.

• Here are the questions I think you should be asking next.

And where it makes sense, I can make introductions.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing is not another insight. It is knowing the right person to talk to next.

3) Editorial Partnerships

There are a lot of really good publications, newsletters, and communities that already serve public servants and civic reformers. But they are often geographically rooted. They might have a strong audience in the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe, or East Asia, but they do not always have someone moving across countries, events, and communities, picking up signals from the wider field.

That is where Civic Punks can be useful.

I can act as a kind of international roving reporter for the future-of-government space. Travelling around, visiting events and projects, talking to people, and feeding those stories and insights back into communities that want to understand what is happening elsewhere.

I am also able to put specific stories and examples into larger international contexts. Seeing patterns and anti-patterns as they emerge.

4) Sponsorship

I have received so much positive support for this work. I want to create easier pathways for people to help.

At the individual level, I have created two ways for people to support Civic Punks directly. Either through a one-off contribution through “Buy Me a Coffee”. Help fund a coffee meeting. Help make a video happen. Help cover a train ride. Every little thing counts.

Or you can become a member of the “Punk Brigade” through Patreon. Here you can help shape how this project develops and connect with fellow punks.

At the organizational level, I’m thinking about two things.

The first is sponsoring a leg of the journey.

Civic Punks is going to move in legs. Asia and the Pacific were the first. Europe is next. Then, hopefully, Africa and South America.

Each leg will have its own questions, stories, people, projects, and patterns. So one way organizations can support Civic Punks is by helping make a leg possible, while also getting a more focused window into the insights from that region through an individualized brief afterwards.

The second is what I’m calling, at least for now, the Founding Circle.

And I’m still figuring this out, so this is me thinking out loud.

The basic idea is a small group of like-minded organizations that believe in the mission of Civic Punks and want to help it succeed. They believe in the importance of content creators for the future of government and, at a deeper level, want to help build the civic punks movement: a trusted, relational layer for the future of government field.

The value is partly getting closer to what Civic Punks is seeing: private briefings from the field, early visibility into emerging ideas, and a chance to support the direction of the work.

But the other value is access to each other. Because there are a lot of organizations trying to make government better. They just are not always connected in the ways they could be. Civic Punks can help convene some of those people together.

I agree this last one needs some work, but I think there is something there worth exploring.

The bigger point

Underneath all of this, there is the bigger point.

Civic Punks is not about me backpacking around the world with an iPhone and a laptop. It is about connecting people and ideas around the future of government. It is about making this field feel more human, more visible, more fun, and more alive. Because there are so many people doing interesting work to make government better.

But a lot of those people feel disconnected from each other.

They are pushing on similar problems in different places, often without knowing who else is pushing with them. And that can feel lonely. Like you are the only one trying to move the boulder up the hill.

But you are not.

Civic Punks are everywhere.

The challenge is helping them find each other. That is what I think storytelling can do. Good storytelling does not just explain what is happening. It creates recognition. It helps people say, “Oh, that is what I’m seeing too.” Or, “That is really interesting, I should talk to that person.”

That is the real mission here. To help weave together the people, ideas, stories, and relationships shaping the future of government. And to do it in a way that does not feel like work but is more fun.

What I need from you

This is where I would love your help.

If you are organizing an event and want it to feel more human and alive, let’s talk.

If your organization is trying to make sense of what is happening across the future-of-government space, let’s talk.

If you run a publication or platform and want stories from the field, let’s talk.

If you want to support Civic Punks directly, sponsor a leg of the journey, or help shape the Founding Circle, also excellent.

But more than anything, send me ideas at derekalton@civicpunks.com:

• Who should I meet?

• What projects should I visit?

• What questions should I be carrying with me into the field?

• What are you seeing that more people need to understand?

Because Civic Punks was never meant to be a finished thing. It is meant to be built in the open, with the people who care about this work.

What I posted this week

I host a quarterly Global Government Innovation Panel with friends from around the world, where we get together to explore what is emerging in the field of public sector innovation. This quarter, one of the key themes that rose to the top was digital sovereignty. This should come as no surprise, as the United States has shifted the board, moving what were previously benign digital platforms into leverage points to be squeezed. This is far too great a vulnerability for most countries to stomach, and they are rapidly moving to forge their own platforms. Luke Cavanaugh shares some of the work that France is doing in this area, but also a warning from the Netherlands. Angela Galeano also talks about LATM GPT, the South American response to Chat GPT. Finally, Brian Whittaker gives a peek into what this all looks like from within the United States. If this is of interest, also check out the video I recorded from Singapore about Cognitive Sovereignty.

What if the job of a designer is not just to make better things, but to build better relationships?

In this conversation, Jessica Watson and I explore the idea of “feeling designers” and why it offers a more holistic way of thinking about design. It pushes beyond the object itself and asks a bigger question: what kind of relationship is being created between the thing we design and the community it lives within?

It is a beautiful concept, but also a practical one. Because the best design is never just about function, form, or efficiency. It is about trust, connection, meaning, and how people actually experience something in the context of their lives.

We talk about why this way of thinking matters, what it changes about the role of a designer, and why it might help us create things that feel more human, more grounded, and more connected to the people they are meant to serve.

If you want to dig into this more, Jessica has a podcast where she interviews other feeling designers about their journey.

Other interesting things from the field

A few things I am paying attention to this week:

• Podcast: How “license on your phone” became an instrument of national security (A Functional Government podcast episode all about Ukraine’s Diia platform)

• Article: Zero-Click Government: Omakase or Loss of Agency? by Beth Noveck

• Article: Why Fixing Government Hiring Matters by Jen Abrahams and Rebecca Heywood

• Article: What 64 Years of Olympic Cost Overruns Can Teach US by Aaron Percival

Something else I am keeping an eye on from this week. The Government of New Zealand just announced 9000 job cuts this week (spread over the next four years). This fits a trend of shrinking the public service being pushed by governments all over the world. Part of this is natural reduction after the expansion of the pandemic years but I think it is more complex than this. It reminds me of the great piece Nick Scott wrote on the perils of austerity. I want to take a deeper dive into this, though it will likely need to wait until summer.

See you next week

Next week, I’ll share more about leg two of Civic Punks: where I’m going, what I’ll be looking for, and how you can help shape the next part of the journey. Also, stay tuned to the Civic Punks YouTube as I will finally be releasing this week the interviews I did at the GovInsider Festival of Innovation in Singapore.

Warm regards,

Derek

Last week, I shared a failure report from the first quarter of Civic Punks.

Nothing says I am a beginner quite like forgetting to click the button that makes your audio sound less terrible. 🤦‍♂️

But this report was also meant to transition Civic Punks into the second quarter. One where the content takes a big step forward. That is what this newsletter will be dedicated to. This is the second in a three-part series on the evolution of Civic Punks. Next week, I will wrap up with a deep dive into how I hope to make all of this sustainable. Then we will be back to our regular programming with the launch of Leg 2.

Don’t worry, there is still interesting content on the future of government at the end of this newsletter. But first, let’s dig into what is next for Civic Punks!

Making the future of government fun

Civic Punks is about exploring the future of government through the eyes of the people who are making it happen. The reformers, designers, technologists, policy people, and community builders. The civic weirdos who are trying to make government work better for people and the planet.

The thing I keep coming back to is that government is fascinating. The people trying to change it are fascinating. The tensions and challenges of this work are fascinating.

But too often, the way we talk about them drains the life out. We find ways of making it dry, and it starts to feel like work. The outcome is you save it to read later because you know you should, you just don’t want to now. God knows my must-read folder on my computer must be hundreds of links long at this point.

I really do not want Civic Punks to feel like homework. I want it to feel like something you might actually choose to spend time with. On a walk. On a train. With coffee. While avoiding whatever task you should probably be doing instead.

The goal is to make the future of government feel human, visible, useful, and even fun. It needs to have soul!

The problem with splashing things everywhere

Up until now, I have mostly been doing what a lot of people do when they start making content. I make a thing. Then I splash it everywhere. YouTube. Podcast. LinkedIn. Newsletter. Instagram. Maybe even a carrier pigeon if the engagement numbers look promising.

This is understandable. Especially when you are one person trying to make a media project while also booking flights, editing video, interviewing people, writing newsletters, finding partners, and occasionally remembering to eat healthy... ok I’m less successful at the last one.

But I do not think it is good enough anymore. It just ends up creating more noise. There is already so much content out there. I do not want to add to the pile just to feel like I am doing something.

I want Civic Punks to help people: understand an idea, discover a cool person, notice a pattern, feel less alone in the work, or see the future of government a little more clearly. That means being more intentional about what goes where.

So here is the plan

The podcast is for deeper conversations. This is where I want to spend time with people. Not just asking them to explain their work, but digging into their story, their tensions, what shaped them, what they are wrestling with, and what they are seeing that the rest of us should pay attention to.

YouTube will dive into one idea per video. One concept. One tension. One observation. Sometimes that will be a “Cool Concept” someone shared with me. Sometimes it will be an older idea that is living “Rent Free” in someone’s brain. Sometimes it will be something I noticed while travelling — a city, a conference, a conversation, a weird little detail that points to something bigger.

YouTube Shorts will be a sharp idea. A useful quote. A quick field note. Something that can stand on its own, but also point people toward the deeper conversation if they want it.

Instagram as a field notebook. Less polished. More raw and authentic. Go behind the scenes with clips from the road, rough thoughts. Basically, a little more of how the sausage gets made.

LinkedIn is going to become more of a conversation space. Not just a broadcast channel where I shout “new thing!” into the void. I want to use it to highlight ideas worth spreading, people worth following, and conversations worth joining. I also want to get better at showing up in the comments, not just on my own posts but in the wider ecosystem. So please tag me into things. Especially if someone is wrestling with a question about the future of government, public service, civic tech, trust, institutions, service design, public innovation, or whether “transformation” has lost all meaning as a word.

The newsletter is where I want to connect the dots. Not just be a recap of everything Civic Punks posted that week. But really digging into a pattern I noticed in the last week across the interviews, travel, articles, conversations, events, comments, reports, hallway chats, and things people send me. The newsletter will be a weekly act of sensemaking.

What I need from you

This is where I would love your help. If Civic Punks is going to become more useful, I need to know what you actually want from it. What are the ideas that you think are most interesting? Who are the people that everyone should be inspired by? What are the projects that deserve more notice? You can reply to this email, leave a comment, or send me a message.

Here is my updated Content Strategy. Please jump in and add your thoughts and comments.

What I posted this week

I love studying leadership; it is so crucial in getting anything done. It is also the most commonly cited blocker to making government better.

Pia Andrews introduced me to a really cool approach she uses to develop leadership capacity. Something she calls “Chair Time.”

The core idea is to give people regular turns sitting in the leadership chair. Not as a one-off emergency acting role or when someone is on leave. But as a deliberate practice for helping people build confidence, make decisions, and understand what is happening across the whole team. What I like about it is that it treats leadership as something people practise together. It also gives senior leaders a bit more space to step back and think strategically. Which, apparently, is useful. Who knew.

Digging into the vault, I finally posted an interview I did with Geoff Mulgan back in December. We covered a lot: the future of government, the power of history, the need to reclaim imagination, and Geoff’s advice for the next generation of public servants. The full interview is well worth a listen: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-y6igp-1abad76

I also clipped one section for YouTube because it gets right into a tension I think we need to talk about more: What kinds of intelligence should government have — and where should the line be?

Government needs better intelligence. Not just more data or fancy dashboards. But a better ability to understand what is happening, see patterns, learn from reality, and make decisions that actually fit the world people are living in. Of course, this gets uncomfortable quickly. Because smarter government can start to sound like Big Brother government. And that raises real questions about privacy, power, surveillance, trust, and who gets to decide what “better intelligence” is used for.

But the opposite has risks too. If government refuses to build this muscle, are we just accepting crappy government as the price of feeling safe? I don’t think there is an easy answer.

Other interesting things from the field

A few things I am paying attention to this week:

• Podcast: Seen not Heard - The Westminster Tradition (surviving as a public servant in a social media world)

• Article: You Don’t Need to be a Techie to Lead in the AI Era by Natasha Clarke

• Article: The myth of the rational policy user by Vansika Jain (The Mandarin)

• Book: Reinventing Strategic Innovation: Create deep change by Kees Dorst, Rodger Watson, Barbara Doran (I stayed with Rodger while in Sydney, check out our interview)

See you next week

Next week, I will dig into a question I have been getting a lot: How might this thing, Civic Punks actually sustain itself? It’s a great and very important question. One I have been thinking a lot about because my savings are dwindling and I am really keen to get out of my parents’ basement! So next week, I will share: “Project get out of parents’ basement!”

Warm regards,

Derek

Last week, I shared a few of my big takeaways from leg one of Civic Punks.

Leg two is just around the corner — Europe, I’m coming your way — and I am genuinely excited. But before I head back out, I have been using this pause to think harder about what Civic Punks is actually becoming.

Over the next few weeks, I want to share more of that thinking with you.

1. Next week, I’ll talk about how I am rethinking the content itself — including this newsletter, videos, interviews, and how all of it fits together.

2. The week after that, I’ll get into the business side of Civic Punks. How does this thing actually work? What might sustain it? What am I trying to build beyond “Derek runs around the world with a camera and a slightly overpacked backpack full of maple syrup (true story)”?

3. And then, in three weeks, I’ll have a proper announcement about leg two, where I will be going and what you can expect from it.

But this week, I want to do something slightly different. I want to talk about failure. So welcome to my first failure report from the front lines of Civic Punks.

Failure 1: The AI voice problem

We live in an increasingly deeply AI-ified world now.

AI is everywhere, and I do think it is going to shape a lot of how Civic Punks develops. I’m using it more. I need to use it better. And next week, I’ll share more about how I’m thinking about AI and content.

But I also got a very clear reminder last week of what can go wrong.

Last week’s newsletter had good ideas in it. The substance was there. But when I read it after sending it, I had that awful sinking feeling. It sounded more like ChatGPT than me. No one wants to read something that sounds like ChatGPT.

Lesson one: use AI to expand what you can do, but do not let it replace your actual voice.

Failure 2: The button I should have clicked

My most successful video from the last month was my conversation with Shannon Salter. Which is wonderful, because Shannon is brilliant and I was genuinely honoured that she gave me her time. The video recently passed 1,000 views, which for Civic Punks is great.

The problem? The audio is terrible.

And the most frustrating part is that this was not some complex production challenge. I use Riverside. There is literally a button you can click to clean up the audio. I had not been clicking the button.

Shannon, I am sorry. You deserved better.

There is a broader lesson here too. I do not need Civic Punks to become overproduced or slick. That is not the vibe. But the work does need to be cleaner. Good ideas deserve decent packaging. People who generously share their time deserve to be heard clearly. And viewers should not have to fight through bad edits, bad audio, or preventable messiness just to get to the good stuff.

Lesson two: keep the human rough edges, lose the avoidable rough edges.

Failure 3: Logistics matter

Then there were the travel mistakes. There were a few.

In Sydney, I had the chance to meet with the head of the Mandarin, Peter Gearin. I was very excited, as I am a big fan of their work and hope I can collaborate with them. I packed my schedule too tightly and didn’t give myself enough time to commute between meetings. I then went the wrong direction and ended up having to run to make up the lost time. I showed up to the meeting with Peter 10 minutes late and drenched in sweat… a great first impression. Peter, to his credit, was incredibly generous, even buying me a beer for my troubles.

For the flight to Wellington, because I forgot to do it ahead of time, I was frantically applying for the right e-visa at the airport counter. I was literally 2 minutes away from missing my flight, but thanks to the kindness of the flight staff and the great online service of the New Zealand passport office, I made it just in time.

I also badly underestimated Tokyo. Tokyo is massive. I knew this in theory. I did not properly respect it in my planning. The outcome was my meetings were spread across the city, and I spent something like five hours a day on trains. The transit itself was excellent. My planning was not.

Lesson three: pay attention to logistics, otherwise they will bite you in the ass (not to mention add a lot of cost).

Failure 4: Losing the plot

The central driving force behind Civic Punks is curiosity. The goal is to be curious about the future of government and the people making it happen. That’s the story, not me.

For the most part, I think I did a good job at this, but sometimes I stumbled, badly…

When I was in Melbourne, I had a chance to visit the team at the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), a really cool organization doing work on the front lines of change in communities around the world. When you are looking for the future of government, CPI is a great place to go.

The team was incredibly generous with their time and listened to me yammer on for 30 minutes about what I was doing with Civic Punks, asking thoughtful questions that really made me think. Then our time was up. Not once did I ask them about their cool projects, even though that’s why I was there. Worse, I didn’t realize my mistake until much later, thanks to a gentle nudge from a mentor of mine.

I was mortified! The whole purpose of Civic Punks is to help share the stories and insights of others, and I had been too self-absorbed to do this. I should get “Be Curious” tattooed on my hand as a reminder. Thankfully, the team at CPI was incredibly gracious, and I plan to interview them about their projects in the coming weeks.

Lesson four: Always remember to be curious. Maybe also make sure you remind yourself of your goals before each meeting.

What I posted this week

Though I have been focusing on planning for the future, I did manage to get a few great pieces posted that I’m especially excited to share:

Suhit Anantula on lines, loops, and vibes

I loved this one. Suhit has such a helpful way of making systems feel tangible, and the “lines, loops, and vibes” framing has been rattling around in my head since we recorded it.

What If Government Loved You? with Thea Snow
My podcast hasn’t been getting enough love in this newsletter (more on this next week), but there are lots of great episodes. Including a new series I am working on, where I interview some of the top minds in the world on their vision for the future of government. This past week, I finally posted a great conversation I had with Thea Snow that was recorded back in December. Thea is one of my heroes in this space, so this was a special one for me. Her provocative question: What if government loved you? As a teaser, next is my interview with Geoff Mulgan, who I think must have written more books on public sector innovation than anyone else. Stay tuned and subscribe to get the newest episodes as they drop.

Other interesting things from the field:

• Article: A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform by Jennifer Pahlka

• Article: The State Capacity Ecosystem: Mapped by Henry Grunzweig

• Podcast: Futuro Publico’s Interview with Charles Landry (Note this is a great spanish podcast but this interview itself is in english)

• Book: Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity

See you next week for a deep dive into the future of Civic Punks and other exciting developments in the future of government.

Warm Regards,

Derek

At first, I’ll be honest, it was frustrating. It felt like everywhere I went, people were talking about AI. It all felt overhyped. Like we were all jumping ahead without really understanding what we were talking about or where we were going.

But as the trip went on, I started to sit with it more. What became clear is that the interesting conversations aren’t actually about AI. Rather, AI is pushing us to ask bigger questions about how government works, what it’s for, and what needs to change.

One moment that really reframed things for me was a conversation over coffee in Singapore with Jeanette Kwek, who has been at the centre of Singapore’s foresight work. I asked her the question I’ve been asking everyone: What does the future of government look like?

She pushed back. There isn’t going to be one future. There are going to be many. So stop looking for a single vision. We’re moving into a more multipolar world, where instead of converging, countries are starting to diverge—experimenting in different directions, shaped by their own realities. That creates tension, no doubt. But it also creates space for real innovation.

Wherever you land on those futures, we are clearly at a turning point. I sensed it everywhere I went. The old way is cracking, but there is still uncertainty about what comes next.

Talking with Nicholas Gruen, who has spent decades working on public sector innovation, there was a sense that the old models aren’t holding in the same way. The structures, the processes, even how we think about “innovation” itself—it’s starting to feel stale. Like its holding in place the status quo instead of ushering in transformation.

This uncertainty about the future isn’t just about ideas. It’s about people. The people who have been pushing change for the last decade—the civic punks, the reformers, the ones challenging the system—are burning out, stepping back, or moving on. But the next wave isn’t fully visible yet. I noticed this from Wellington to Adelaide.

The same is true for the spaces that have held this work. The events, the networks, the gathering points—they don’t seem to have the same energy they once did. But it’s not obvious what replaces them, or what this next version looks like.

And sitting alongside all of that is AI as a catalyst for change. A conversation I had with Pirth Singh, a CIO in the Government of Canada, really brought that home. We’re moving from AI as a tool to AI as something more like a collaborator—agents that act, not just respond. In a very short period of time, it’s not hard to imagine public servants working alongside and managing teams of AI agents.

This means a change in the type of work that public servants are doing. Moving from delivery to management. That opens up real possibilities. But it also raises real risks.

One of the clearest moments for me was hearing Neville Pinto speak in Victoria. He had this simple image (shown below): above the desk, all the excitement about AI. Below the desk, chaos.

(slide from Neville Pinto’s presentation, the Public Sector Networks Government Innovation Week in Victoria)

His point was simple—if we don’t deal with what’s under the desk, none of this works. AI doesn’t remove complexity. It amplifies it. And yet, what stood out to me most wasn’t the caution—it was the optimism.

In Malaysia, in Singapore, even in Victoria, Australia, there was a consistent thread: if AI can take care of the process, the administrative weight, the back-end work…what does that free humans up to do? Could this actually make government more human? Able to spend more time with people. Build relationships. Bring some of the soul back into systems that often feel like a faceless machine.

Which brings me back to a conversation in Singapore, sitting over chicken rice with Liana Tang, talking about her work on strategic friction.

In trying to make things seamless, we sometimes strip away the very signals that tell us something matters. Friction, done well, is about meaning. It’s about where we choose to pay attention.

So maybe that’s one of the real questions sitting underneath all of this: In a world that is becoming increasingly frictionless…where do we choose to slow things down?

Because if this trip has reinforced anything for me, it’s this—We’re at a real transition point. The old ways aren’t quite working. The new ways aren’t fully formed.

And somewhere in between, there’s a space opening up.

The question is who—and what—fills it.

Addendum: Two futures I’m starting to see

I don’t think we’re starting from scratch.

There are already signals of what this next phase of government could look like.

Two that stood out to me on this trip:

1. The Agentic State

One path is what Manuel Killian and his team have been working on—what they call the agentic state.

The idea is fairly straightforward, but the implications are big. Instead of people navigating government systems, agents do it for them. AI moves from being a tool to something that acts on your behalf.

What I found helpful about Manuel’s work is that it doesn’t stop at the idea. They’ve started to map the components of what this actually requires—and even more interestingly, look at how it’s being applied in practice. Ukraine is one of the first real examples of this being pushed forward at a national level.

2. Government organized around life events

The second path is the idea of reorganizing government around life events, rather than departments.

I saw this most clearly in a conversation with Shannon Salter, who’s been driving this work in British Columbia through Connected Services.

Instead of asking people to navigate government, government organizes itself around how people actually live their lives. Birth. Starting a business. Losing a job. Caring for someone.

What makes this real (not just a nice idea) are the building blocks underneath it—things like rules as code and shared service maps.

One of the most concrete examples I came across was the “universal menu” built by Hideyuki Yasui and his team at Asukoe Partners. They have mapped government services across all levels in Japan in a way that AI (and humans) can actually use.

These two paths aren’t mutually exclusive. If anything, they reinforce each other.

But they do give a glimpse of what this next phase might look like—not just in theory, but in practice.

And maybe that’s the real shift—we’re starting to move from talking about the future to building it. As I shift into planning for Leg 2 in Europe this June, that is becoming my focus. I want to really find cases and examples of this future of government being built. So subscribe to stay tuned for more adventures soon.

Leg 1 is officially in the books. Next week I’ll zoom out and share the big themes from the whole journey. But for now, I want to stay close to the ground and reflect on the final stretch: Canberra and Tokyo.

Field Notes from Canberra

I spent a few days in Canberra at a Policy Innovation / OpenFisca gathering. It felt very different from the conference in Melbourne the week before. Less polished. Smaller. More grassroots. But also more relational. People actually hung out in the evenings, and we even created a group Slack Channel.

A few ideas stuck with me.

Policy is not a destination

We still tend to treat policy like something you “finish.”

You design it. Approve it. Launch it. Done.

But one of the key ideas that came up is: Policy isn’t a destination. It’s a relationship. Between people, institutions, and the context they sit in. Which means it’s always moving. We’re starting to get tools that let us work this way. But the institutions haven’t caught up yet.

Vibes, loops, and lines

One of my favourite sessions was from Suhit Anantula. He framed work in three modes:

• Vibes — intuition, emergence, when you don’t know enough yet

• Loops — testing, iterating, learning

• Lines — locking things in and scaling

*I will be interviewing Suhit about this next week, so stay tuned for more.

What I liked about this is that it gives language to something I’ve been feeling: As the world gets faster and more complex, we need to get better at operating in the “vibes” space. Less certainty. More intuition. Similar to the idea of a reflex, I shared from the States of Change video last month

The tools are getting real

A lot of the conversation centred around three tools:

• Rules as Code

• Digital Twins

• Synthetic Data

You don’t need to know the technical details to see the potential impact. We’re moving toward a world where:

• policy and program logic become explicit, so anyone can play with it

• we can simulate decisions before making them

• we can work with data without breaking privacy

That’s a big deal and opens up tons of exciting possibilities. But it also raised a question for me. In Tokyo, Keita Nishiyama talked with me about the importance of improvisation in government. Front-line flexibility is often what makes rigid systems actually work. So I keep wondering: As we formalize everything… do we lose the ability to improvise?

Field Notes from Tokyo

Tokyo felt like stepping into a different layer of the future.

Two ideas really stayed with me.

Government that wraps around people

I spent time with Hideyuki Yasui and Naho Kitano, who are working on something pretty ambitious. They’ve mapped government programs across all levels in Japan into life events. Things like: Birth. Education. Work. Housing. Death. The idea is simple: Instead of people having to try and navigate government… government should wrap around people. From there, they want to go even bigger. A kind of universal map of government programs across countries. Because at the end of the day, we’re all dealing with the same core life events. If you can standardize that layer, you unlock:

• easier movement between countries

• faster learning between governments

• better services built on top

It feels like one of those foundational ideas that could quietly reshape how government works moving forward.

What is a “beautiful” government?

This was Naho’s question. And it caught me off guard. We never talk about government in those terms. But why not?

Governments are made by people, for people. So they carry emotion. And beauty is a pretty fundamental human idea. I’ve been sitting with this: If you judge a government by the society it creates. Then a beautiful government creates a beautiful society. Not just one where needs are met. But one where people belong and can actually flourish.

What does a beautiful government look like to you?

Now You Know - The Agentic State

One of the most important ideas I’ve come across on this trip is the Agentic State.

I had the chance to sit down with Manuel Kilian in Singapore, who’s been leading this work with the Global Government Technology Centre and the World Bank. The core question: What does government look like in a world of AI agents?

And just as importantly: What does government need to do to use them well… and protect against them?

They’ve just released a case study on Ukraine as one of the first countries actively building toward this. I broke it down in the video below. Check out all the work on the Agentic State HERE.

Rent Free - Saving

This week’s Rent Free is with Amber Guette. If you know her work, you won’t be surprised that this was a great conversation. I asked her what idea has most shaped her thinking. She picked The Catcher in the Rye.

Her take: The job of people inside government is to be the catcher. The one who steps in before things go off the edge. Before people fall through the cracks. Before systems fail in ways that hurt real people.

Bridging Leg 1 to Leg 2

This trip has been… dense. Way more ideas, conversations, and stories than I can fit into these newsletters. So I’ll keep unpacking them over the next several weeks.

Next up:

I’ll zoom out and try to make sense of the bigger picture from Leg 1.

Then… onto Europe in June.

It feels like we’ve lost our mojo.

This isn’t unique to one place. But across multiple countries. Australia. New Zealand. Canada.

Something feels… off.

Government Innovation Week Victoria

I spent the week in Melbourne at Public Sector Network’s Government Innovation Week.

One thing was impossible to miss: AI is everywhere.

Every single discussion was either about AI or at least had AI as a piece of it.

One talk that really stuck with me was from Nigel Pinto. His core point: AI is increasing the interconnectivity of systems which increases risk.

This is because interconnected systems are more complex with more interdependencies. Combine that with AI systems that are black boxes, and you have lots of uncertainty, and second and third-order consequences that are harder to predict and map.

Also, if you’re feeding messy, poorly understood data into these systems (which is much of government data), you increase the chances of outputs you don’t understand.

This really challenges the assumption that AI can clean up the mess that is government rules, policies and processes.

There’s another question I have been pondering:

Are we talking about AI this much because governments need it… or because vendors are pushing it?

It reminds me a lot of cloud a few years ago. I was always so confused about why it seemed to be such a huge focus when other sectors had moved on a decade ago, then I realized vendors were making mint off of the government. I worry that we are starting to find ourselves in a similar mess now with AI.

A great dinner conversation

One of the highlights of the week was a dinner social I hosted in Melbourne.

We pulled together a mix of people from different backgrounds. That diversity made the conversation way more interesting.

A few ideas that stuck with me:

• There is a growing theme around relocalizing government, to make it more accessible and easier to participate. So this means bringing resources and agency closer to where the action is.

• People spoke with great frustration about how government seemed to always be a blocker when its promise was to be the great enabler.

• We also had a really interesting debate about mandatory national service. Not necessarily military. But the idea that everyone must service time to building their community. This would not only build community capacity but also give everyone a common baseline experience to bond people across diversity. It’s a provocative idea. But also… kind of compelling?

I want to do this more often. Hosting Civic Punk socials wherever I go.

It feels like we’ve lost a step

Across a lot of places I’ve been, I’m seeing a similar pattern:

• Older generations are burning out and becoming disillusioned

• Newer generations aren’t fully stepping

And the connection between the two groups feels weak. Something broke during the pandemic. And I’m not sure we’ve fully recovered.

It makes me wonder: Are we at the end of one era… and the beginning of another?

A lot of the organizations, events and networks from the pre-pandemic world are still around. But they seem to have lost their spark. Honestly, I think we are seeing the same dynamic in political parties, with a lot of the historically dominant parties struggling. They’re still running… but something is missing.

At the same time, the new forms haven’t fully emerged yet. So we’re stuck in this in-between space. A kind of trough between two worlds.

In some ways, this is what Civic Punks is about. Trying to find — or maybe help build — what comes next 🤔.

Now You Know (New Video)

(note: my favourite thumbnail yet!)

Are we making a big mistake with cuts?

This week’s video looks at a piece by Nick Scott. Almost every government I’ve visited is going through some form of austerity right now. The logic is simple: We expanded during the pandemic. Now we need to contract.

But how we contract matters.

Right now, most governments seem to be going for the easiest options:

• hiring freezes

• not renewing short-term contracts

• early retirements

And hoping AI will fill the gap.

Nick uses a great metaphor: This is like turning down the water in a pipe… and then being surprised when you get poor water pressure on the other side. If you want better outcomes, you don’t just reduce flow. You redesign the pipes.

The problem? That takes time. And resources. Which are exactly the things being cut.

My take:

There’s a lot of hope being placed on AI to fill the capacity gap. Long term, that might happen. Short term… I’m skeptical. We’re trying to adopt a technology we don’t fully understand, in systems that aren’t ready, with people who don’t have time to learn it. That’s a tough combination. The outcome is a decrease in the quality of government, which has lots of negative ripple effects. In the end, I expect this rush for cuts will ultimately cost us more.

Geoff Mulgan has a great piece on how cuts can be done well that I think everyone should read. I made a video about it.

Rent Free

This week’s Rent Free is with Brenton Caffin. He chose the book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. It’s all about how to structure organizations to actually work. A few ideas that stuck with me:

• Top-level governance shapes everything below it - If you get that wrong, everything downstream feels it.

• Organizations need to evolve - Stay grounded in purpose, and keep asking: Is this still the best way to achieve it?

• Performance vs innovation - You need both. But more importantly, you need people moving between them.

That last point really stuck with me. It reminded me of a conversation I had recently with my friend Almero Oosthuizen about the tension between front-line work and back-office systems (I have a video about our conversation coming out soon).

The key lesson is that those worlds need to connect more than they currently do.

Next stop:

Wrapping up Australia in Canberra (OpenFisca + Fearless Frankies and so much more). Then heading to Tokyo for the final stop on leg 1.

Field Notes from Australia

The Temple

I got to spend some time in Sydney with the wonderful Rodger Watson.

We went on hikes, cheered on his daughter at a Scouts regatta, and in between all that, talked about his new book.

At the core is the idea that a healthy innovation ecosystem needs four things:

• a lab (to try stuff)

• an academy (to share what works)

• a podium (to amplify it and give it credibility)

• and a temple

The first three, I agree. I’ve heard versions of them before. But the temple was new for me.

Trying to change a system is hard. It’s slow, frustrating, and honestly, pretty exhausting at times. People doing this work burn out all the time.

The idea of a place where people can go to recover and refuel feels… important. And also something we don’t really design for… yet. Maybe we should start organizing Civic Punk retreats 🤔.

Farmers Insights

Rodger and my good friend Bani Singh also pulled together a great group of people for dinner. One of them, a designer named Steve Sullivan, really pushed my thinking (ha, I just realized he shares the same name as one of my favourite hockey players growing up…so random).

He said that if you want to understand the future of government, don’t just look inside your own field. Look to the edges. Or completely outside it:

Farmers. Nurses. Kids.

That’s where different perspectives live, in the adjacent possible. Is this where I am going? Maybe I need to push myself more outside that world.

What actually works

Before this trip, I had a great conversation with Graham Flack. He’s been a huge champion of public sector innovation in Canada at the highest levels, and he gave me a lot to think about. One idea in particular is sticking:

Stop chasing what’s new. Look for what actually works.

The thing that was done five years ago… and is still making a difference today. That’s part of what inspired the Rent Free series.

A great example came up in Adelaide: the Thinkers in Residence program. South Australia would bring in global thinkers to work with local people for a few months. What came out of it was not just ideas but institutions that have stood the test of time. Things like TACSI, the Royal Institute of Australia, and even the roots of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival.

Now You Know (New Video)

Quick note on format.

I had planned to do two of these a week. Turns out… that’s not happening while travelling 😅. So moving forward, I am just going to do one a week, and instead will try to share more content from the road (I have a couple of dozen in backlog).

Are we getting innovation wrong?

This week’s video is based on a great article by Gian Durán.

His core point: We’re using the word “innovation” way too loosely. Everything becomes innovation. And when everything is innovation… nothing really is.

He breaks it down into three things:

• Renovation (I prefer the word optimization) — making something better

• Innovation — doing something new

• Transformation — changing the system itself

I found this distinction really helpful. Especially right now, when governments are trying to cut costs. Because there’s a tension here:

Optimization saves money. Innovation costs money (at least at first). So everyone says they want innovation…Until the bill shows up. What they really want is optimization, but is that what we need right now? (I have a great video exploring this idea next week on an article written by Nick Scott, so stay tuned)

Rent Free

This week, I sat down with Pia Andrews, one of my all-time heroes and one of the inspirations for the term Civic Punks. I asked her what ideas have been living rent-free in her head. She gave me three:

• Don Watson — Death Sentence
  Basically, a critique of how business language has taken over government.
  Her takeaway: be direct in your comms, say what you actually mean.

• Tim O’Reilly — Government as a Platform
  Government should be more than just a policy and service delivery machine. It can serve as a platform that enables people to build upon it.

• Catherine Althaus - The Application of Agency Theory to Public Management*
  A warning about separating policy from delivery… which, if you’ve worked in government, you’ve probably felt firsthand.

*I couldn’t find a link but here is the source: Althaus C, 1997, 'The Application of Agency Theory to Public Management', in Davis G; Sullivan B; Yeatman A (ed.), The New Contractualism?, MacMillan

Three different ideas. But they all point to something I keep coming back to: How we talk, how we structure, and how we deliver are all deeply connected.

What’s next

This week, I’m in Melbourne for Public Sector Network’s Government Innovation Week Victoria. I’ve put together a pregame show on what I think will be some of the key themes — worth checking out if you’re following along. I’ll also be posting videos from the floor throughout the week.

Then on Thursday, I’m off to Wellington to spend time with one of my literary inspirations, Amber Guette, the team at the Policy Project and Jarred Griffiths from Hutt City Council.

One thing I’m taking with me

This week shifted something for me. If I’m trying to understand the future of government… Then maybe the answers aren’t just inside government. Maybe they’re:

• in the people just outside it

• in completely different fields

• in things that have quietly worked over time

So the question I’m sitting with now is: Where am I not looking that I should be?
Let me know your ideas for where I should be looking.

Next stop: Australia → New Zealand 🌏

Let’s see what’s next.

What does the future of government look like when things are messy?

Because after Singapore, I landed in Kuala Lumpur.

And very quickly, one thing became clear:

This is not Singapore.

Field Notes from Malaysia:

Chaos breeds innovation

Singapore is clean, polished, ordered. You spend a week there, and it’s obvious why it’s one of the best governments in the world at delivery.

Kuala Lumpur is… not that.

It’s loud. Messy. Chaotic.

But that chaos comes with something else: agency.

People don’t wait.

You want to turn left? You turn left. Even if there’s a car coming. It’ll stop. Probably with a lot of honking, but it’ll stop.

That same energy shows up in how people solve problems.

In Singapore, there’s a tendency to look to government for solutions.

In Malaysia, people are much more likely to use what’s around them and figure it out themselves.

And the result?

Innovation is everywhere. Not always polished. Not always scalable. But very real.

It made me wonder:

Are we underestimating the role of chaos in enabling innovation?

Art as a bridge between worlds

One of the highlights of the week was visiting Malaysia’s National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage (ASWARA).

Huge thank you to Ayisha, Fido, and the team for the warm welcome.

I was treated to a private performance by Pak Nasir, a master of Wayang Kulit, the ancient art of shadow puppetry.

Afterwards, we had a conversation about the role this art form has played historically. At one point, Wayang Kulit acted as a bridge between the royal court and the public.

That idea stuck with me.

Art as a bridge between worlds.

In a time where we are increasingly divided, it raises an interesting question:

How might we use art more intentionally to bridge gaps between people, systems, and perspectives?

Not just culturally, but in how we design policy and public services.

Government as a lighthouse

I also spent time with Malaysia’s National AI Office (NAIO).

Lots of interesting ideas, but one metaphor really stood out:

Government as a lighthouse.

A lighthouse doesn’t control the sea. Nor does it stop storms.

But it helps guide ships through uncertain waters.

In a world being reshaped by AI, maybe that’s the role of government:

Not to control everything. But to help people navigate change safely. This is what they are exploring at the NAIO.

In Malaysia’s case, that means equipping people with the knowledge and tools to use AI in ways that benefit society.

You can check out more reflections from Malaysia on the new Civic Punks Instagram

Now You Know (New Videos)

Each week I create a couple short videos breaking down ideas and articles that stuck with me.

Here are two from this week:

Have We Broken Innovation?

This video explores a great article by Ian Montgomery on how innovation in government often becomes performative.

We talk a lot about innovation.
But much of what we call innovation is just innovation theatre.

The really interesting idea is this:

Maybe the goal of innovation isn’t to scale.

Maybe it’s meant to orbit the system — pulling on it, shaping it, but never fully becoming part of it.

Navigating Tensions

This video looks at a piece from the States of Change network: Signals from Apolitical Day. This has been one of the most impactful things I have read in a while.

They highlight seven forces shaping government right now:

• Speed

• Complexity

• Emotional weight

• Politicization

• Conflict

• Identity

• Expectations

But the idea that stuck with me most is this:

Public servants aren’t solving problems anymore.
They’re managing tensions.

Speed vs stewardship.
Centralization vs distribution.
Clarity vs ambiguity.

These aren’t problems to solve or things to balance. Rather, it is about polarity management. Riding the flow of the system

And in a world that’s moving faster, that also means developing reflexes or intuition — the ability to act without perfect information.

This is something I’m going to keep digging into.

Rent Free

In another episode of Rent Free — the series where I ask people which ideas live rent free in their heads — I sat down with Charles McIvor.

Charles works on missions at the OECD and writes a daily newsletter on innovation, so he’s reading a lot. I was curious what had actually stuck with him.

He landed on an article called “The Housing Theory of Everything.”

What grabbed him — and what really stuck with me — is how it connects housing to everything else.

Not just affordability.

But economic growth. Inequality. Politics.

And in Charles’ case, he was particularly interested in the downstream impacts in Canada — especially what it means for our ability to innovate.

If people can’t afford to live in the same places, it becomes much harder for talent to cluster. And that clustering — like we saw in Silicon Valley — is often what drives innovation in the first place.

Once you start seeing housing through that lens, you kind of can’t unsee it.

And if you’re into this kind of thinking, Charles also writes a great daily newsletter on innovation.

Next stop: Australia 🇦🇺

Kicking things off in Darwin with one of my heroes, Pia Andrews, before heading to Adelaide to spend time with two other favourites of mine in Margie Caust and Brenton Caffin and looking forward to making lots of new friends along the way.

Let’s see what Australia has to teach us.

What does the future of government look like from the vantage point of one of the best-run governments in the world — and one with arguably the strongest foresight team anywhere?

Singapore consistently ranks near the top of global lists for well-run public services. And its foresight unit is widely seen as one of the most sophisticated in government.

So if you want to start exploring the future of government, Singapore is a pretty logical place to begin.

My host, Yogesh, packed my schedule with meetings, site visits, and conversations across government. It was intense in the best possible way.

Now that I’ve left Singapore and finally have a bit of breathing room, I’m starting to process what I saw.

These are very early reflections on a few patterns stood out.

Field Notes from Singapore

Survival requires competence

Singapore is a small, young country surrounded by larger powers. That reality shapes how the state thinks.

When survival isn’t guaranteed, dysfunction isn’t really an option.

Three beliefs seem to sit at the heart of the system:

• Survival requires competence

• People are the ultimate resource

• Government must be capable

When failure has real consequences, state capacity becomes a national priority.

People are the ultimate resource

Singapore doesn’t have oil, forests, or large natural resources. So the country treats human capital as its most important asset.

You see this in major investments in education, housing, and skills.

At the same time, Singapore has built a social system designed to provide a strong floor that people can build from. One person described it to me not as a safety net, but as a trampoline — something designed to catch people and bounce them back into the economy.

Interestingly, many Singaporeans will quickly say they live in a capitalist society.

But when you look at how actively the state shapes opportunity and stability, it can sometimes look more interventionist than some European welfare states.

Legitimacy through performance

Singapore is still a democracy. Elections happen regularly.

But one party has always dominated politics.

What stood out to me is that legitimacy seems to come less from democratic competition and more from delivery — the ability to provide safety, prosperity, stability, and opportunity.

There’s a social contract: some limits on individual freedom in exchange for high-performing governance.

Execution matters

Another thing that struck me was the speed of execution.

Once a national priority is set, projects can move quickly because political coordination is easier and procedural friction is lower.

By contrast, many Western democracies have accumulated decades of rules and safeguards that diffuse power so widely that governments struggle to deliver major projects or respond quickly to crises.

A governance laboratory

Singapore is also unusually able to experiment.

It’s small, relatively young, and deeply invested in foresight and long-term thinking. That combination makes it easier to try new approaches.

And in a world where governance models may be diverging rather than converging, places like Singapore become laboratories for experimentation.

Here are more of my reflections from Singapore:

AI and the Future of Government

Another theme that came up in several conversations was how artificial intelligence may reshape government.

One insight kept coming up: AI may transform government less by replacing jobs and more by changing how work happens.

Think about government as a network of workflows — processes that move information and decisions through institutions.

AI will likely transform those workflows in three stages:

1. Automating workflows
AI takes over routine administrative work — paperwork, processing, and basic analysis.

2. Redesigning workflows
Once AI is embedded, governments begin reorganizing how work flows through institutions.

3. Rethinking the problems themselves
Eventually, the technology changes what governments believe is possible to deliver in the first place.

Ironically, as AI absorbs more routine administrative work, the human side of government may become more important rather than less.

Public servants may spend less time on paperwork and more time on judgment, problem-solving, and working directly with citizens.

At the same time, AI raises a strategic question: cognitive sovereignty.

If governments increasingly rely on AI systems built by external providers, maintaining the ability to think, innovate, and govern independently may become a new dimension of national sovereignty.
More thought on AI here:

Now You Know (New Videos)

Each week, I create a couple of short videos breaking down interesting articles and ideas I’ve come across.

Here are two I made this week.

The Power of Data

This video explores a great article by Rebecca M. Mbeya from The African Innovator Series, featuring Namibian data analyst Pambili Paula Hitemba.

Her core insight is simple but powerful: data is never neutral.

How we collect, clean, and interpret data shapes how we understand reality — and that shapes how governments respond to problems.

AI can detect patterns.
But meaning still requires human judgment.

Watch the video here:

Can We Fix Government Hiring?

Another video this week looks at a piece by Robert Gordon from the Recoding America Fund about one of government’s most overlooked challenges: hiring.

Many public sector hiring systems are simply too slow and too rigid for the complexity of today’s challenges.

Some governments are experimenting with fixes like removing outdated exams and shifting toward skills-based hiring.

The lesson is simple: governments don’t just struggle to find talent — their hiring systems often block it.

Watch the video here:

📸 Civic Punks is now on Instagram

One more exciting update: Civic Punks is now on Instagram.

This account will be a bit more raw and behind-the-scenes. I’ll be sharing short clips from the road, photos from the journey, and snapshots of the Civic Punks I meet along the way.

If you want to follow the adventure as it unfolds, come join me there.

https://www.instagram.com/civicpunks/

One thought I’m leaving Singapore with

For a long time, it felt like the world was slowly converging toward one model of government.

Now it feels like the opposite may be happening.

Different countries are experimenting with different ways of organizing government, building state capacity, and responding to new challenges.

And that might actually be a good thing.

Because it means we now have many experiments happening at once.

The real question may not be which model wins.

It may be:

What can we learn from the different experiments unfolding around the world?

That’s the lens I’ll be carrying with me as the Civic Punks journey continues.

Next stop: Kuala Lumpur.

Well… the first official week of this crazy adventure called Civic Punks is in the books.

And what a good way to start.

Monday – Launch Night (Include Photos)

This wild vision is now real.

On Monday, we officially launched Civic Punks in Ottawa. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who came out. The room had such a beautiful mix of ages, backgrounds, public servants, builders, skeptics, and dreamers. Exactly the kind of energy I was hoping for.

I gave an impromptu, unscripted talk about the vision for the project. No script. Just heart. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

It still feels surreal that this is happening.

PSN Government Innovation Week – A Country at a Crossroads

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was at Public Sector Network’s Government Innovation Week for the Government of Canada.

In my pre-game analysis, I said we’re in a pivotal moment for Canada. Being in the room confirmed that feeling.

Here’s the context we’re operating in:

• Major cuts — the steepest in well over a decade. Low morale. Real loss of capacity.

• Technological disruption — a hope that AI can help backfill some of that capacity. A much more mature conversation about adoption.

• Sovereignty and Canadian capacity — serious discussion about reducing dependency on the US tech stack and investing more intentionally in Canadian business and infrastructure.

The first day was a smaller gathering for around 100 senior leaders. A few things that I noticed from the day:

First, the strong focus on burnout and self-care among leaders. That tells you something about the pressure they’re under.

Second, a clear shift in the AI conversation. Moving from a focus on adoption to deeper thinking around how to use AI to reorganize government.

There’s a move from seeing AI as an “adoption target” to seeing it as an augmentation tool. Re-centering people. Asking: how does this make public servants better at serving?

One line that’s still rattling around in my head:

Stop treating policy as the lynchpin to action. You don’t always need to wait.

People were using AI before the AI policy was finalized. Reality moves faster than governance. That tension is real.

Here is my reflection from day 1

The Main Day

A phrase that kept coming up: Move from process to outcome. It started to feel cliché. Everyone agrees. Much harder to do.

Our structures and incentives are deeply wired around process. Compliance. Risk management. Procedure. Shifting to outcomes requires rewiring culture, incentives, and accountability.

Some notable moments:

• CANChat — the Government of Canada’s internal AI chatbot. Shared Services Canada (SSC) President Scott Jones envisions it becoming a central augmentation tool for public servants moving forward. The challenge: it’s still running on older AI models.

• Jones also had a strong message for vendors. There’s a clear desire to diversify, buy Canadian and reduce vendor leverage. He also pushed for open source and open standards, noting such a focus as an act of confidence (and had a Freudian slip and said “competence.”) for vendors. Strong words, we will see if it is backed up with action.

• Paul Wagner, CEO of Canadian Digital Services(CDS), was on stage a lot over the two days. His central point: we need to stop obsessing over “digital” and refocus on service delivery. Digital is a means. Service is the mission.

• The closing talk in the cybersecurity stream was a sobering reminder: the biggest vulnerability in most systems is human. Which means the response must also be human-centred.

I am still working on the video reflection, but the audio is completed and posted here.

🎥 Launching “Now You Know”

This week also marked the launch of a few new pieces. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I will release short 5-10 minute reflections on key articles and ideas that are shaping the space, under the title: Now you Know!"

Have we become too digital?

Becky Miller is exploring how we recenter humans in public services.

Her core idea: Use digital for transactional interactions. Bring humans to the front end of complex cases where empathy is essential.

She created a great visual that captures this shift (insert graph here).

It’s simple. And powerful.

(Graph courtesy of Becky Miller’s blog)

Your new best friend

Geoff Mulgan explores what it would mean for government to act as a companion in life. Put another way, how do we help move government from reactive to proactive?

Geoff explored it in four case studies:

• Health

• Jobs and skills

• Money

• Local neighbourhoods

I am keen to see more experiments.

Rent Free – The idea Ryan keeps coming back to

On Friday’s I will be releasing videos about ideas that are living “rent free” in someone’s head. These are ideas that are continuing to shape people long after they first came across them.

To kick things off, Ryan shares how Beth Noveck’s Wiki Government continues to shape his thinking years later.

It’s about reimagining the relationship between people and their governments as participatory and interactive. Less broadcast. More collaboration.

✈️ Singapore Is Next

This week, I officially hit the road.

First stop: Singapore.

Here’s what’s coming:

• GovMesh – a deep dive into digital government transformation in East Asia

• GovInsider Festival of Innovation – exploring what innovation looks like in the region and where it’s heading

And time with:

• Singapore’s Public Library, doing interesting work around participatory democracy

• The Public Sector Transformation Team

• The Foresight and Futures team

• The Behavioural Insights team

Asia and the Pacific is Leg One. And we’re starting strong.

More reflections every Monday.

The adventure officially begins now.

Thank you for subscribing to the Civic Punks Substack.

This is my first official newsletter. I’m experimenting with format, structure, tone — the whole thing. So please, genuinely, reply and tell me what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d want more of.

Alright. Let’s get into it.

One Week Before Launch

This is the week before Civic Punks officially launches.

Which means: logistics, emails, gear, stickers, booking meetups and flights. More emails.

It’s been a busy one.

But I can’t tell you how excited I am.

Leg One of the tour kicks off in Asia and the Pacific, and there are some very fun things planned. If you haven’t already, make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube and the podcast feed — that’s where most of the on-the-ground content will land.

This week has been about getting everything ready to go.

The Website Is Live (and We Have Stickers)

The Civic Punks website is now live.

We officially have stickers.

And I made tour t-shirts.

They’re designed like band shirts, with the tour dates on the back. I’m hoping to get them signed along the way — a kind of living artifact of this first year.

Launch Events – Ottawa & Vancouver

We’re kicking this off properly.

The official Civic Punks launch happens in Ottawa on Monday February 23rd in the evening at Lowertown Brewery.

If you’re in Ottawa, I would absolutely love to see you there. Bring a friend. Bring a colleague. Let’s pack the room and send this thing off properly.

I’ll be sharing more about the tour, what to expect, and what Civic Punks is really about.

I have a very short layover in Vancouver on Friday, so we’re doing a quick pop-up gathering. If you’re in Vancouver, come out. And please pass it along to people you know there.

Canadian Open Data + GovMaker Content Is Live

After several months, I’ve finally posted the videos and podcast from the Canadian Open Data and GovMaker Summit this fall.

There is some really interesting stuff happening in New Brunswick.

I did a series of interviews from the floor of the summit, and I’ve compiled everything into a full podcast episode, including:

• A pre-game show with Nick Scott — the godfather of GovMaker

• A conversation with Vanessa Pessani, whose organization, the Pond-Deshpande Centre, hosted the summit this year.

• A collection of interviews from the summit floor with speakers and attendees sharing their takeaways.

You can find the full package here: videos and podcast

🎙 Civil Service World Podcast

This one feels surreal.

Civil Service World — the UK publication focused on public service — invited me onto their podcast.

I’ve been listening to the Civil Service World podcast for years. And now I’m on it.

I spoke with Susanna about Civic Punks, the tour, and the bigger questions around the future of government.

The episode is live here.

What’s Next

Going forward, these newsletters will be more content-heavy.

This first one is mostly updates because I’m in launch mode. But once the tour begins, I’ll be diving deeper into:

• The ideas emerging from the road

• Debates about public sector innovation, digital transformation, AI, and the future of government

• Patterns I’m seeing across countries

• Conversations that stick with me

The goal is to balance tour updates with ideas that are actually useful and thought-provoking.

Thank You

Seriously.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of this.

I’m incredibly excited to go on this journey with all of you.

Let’s see where it takes us.

— Derek

More people voted in elections around the world that year than at any other point in human history.

And across countries, systems, and political cultures, one message came through loud and clear:

Government isn’t working. It needs to change! Now!

It didn’t matter where you lived. Or what your political stripes.

There is a shared sense that something fundamental is broken.

And that’s kicked off a massive political push to change the way government works.

So now we know we have a problem.

The real question is: change to what? What does better government look like?

This is why I’m obsessed with government.

And I know — hear me out — government sounds boring. Bureaucratic. Slow. Painful.

But here’s the thing.

The quality of government we have shapes the quality of society we have.

Full stop.

No matter what issue you care about — climate change, housing, inequality, healthcare, AI, food security — government is the most powerful lever we have to do something about it.

Run a business? Government provides the conditions you need to succeed through start up grants and infrastructure. Not to mention legal protection.

Government sets the rules.
Moves massive amounts of money.
Creates guardrails — or removes them.

Nothing else even comes close.

And yet… we all know it’s not working the way it needs to.

Government feels out of date.
Stuck in models that don’t fit the world we’re actually living in.

That’s not a small problem.

Because when government struggles, everything downstream struggles too.

And right now, we’re living through overlapping crises — a real polycrisis — and the system we rely on most is under the most strain.

So we’re entering a period of massive transformation in how government works.

Honestly, I’d argue it’s one of the most important transformations happening anywhere right now.

More important than most of the tech hype you’re hearing about.

Because all of that is downstream from government.

So the question I can’t stop thinking about is:

What is the future of government that works for both people and the planet?
And just as important: who is making it happen?

Because this transformation isn’t happening in the abstract.

It’s happening through people.

Now I want to introduce you to the real heroes of this story:

Civic Punks.

Around governments all over the world, there are people who care deeply about their communities.

People who look at the current government and say, “this isn’t good enough.” But instead of throwing up their hands in despair, they dig in.

They combine a passion for helping their communities with a rebelliousness against the status quo.

I call these people Civic Punks.

They’re not anti-government.
They’re pro-better-government.

They’re builders.
Translators.
System hackers in the best sense of the word.

And they are everywhere.

Most of us just never get to see them.

This is my community, I have spent the last 17 years immersed in it as an academic, activist, public servant and community builder. And now I want to take you with me, behind the scenes to where the real change is happening.

That’s what Civic Punks is about.

Civic Punks is a video and podcasting project exploring the future of government through the people trying to make it work better.

I want to go into their worlds.
Spend time with them.
Understand what they’re trying, what’s failing, and what’s quietly working.

And I want to share those stories in formats people actually engage with — videos, podcasts, short explainers — not dense reports that sit unread.

This isn’t about pretending there’s one right answer.

It’s about exploration.

Because the truth is: we don’t yet know what a government fit for our time fully looks like.

But people all over the world are trying to figure it out.

So over the coming months, I’ll be traveling and sharing stories from different places around the world.

Talking to public servants.
Reformers.
People inside the system trying to change it.

I’ll be unpacking the ideas shaping this moment — and making them accessible for people who care but don’t have time to wade through jargon.

You’ll find this on:

• the Civic Punks YouTube channel, podcast, and through a weekly newsletter that connects the dots.

If any of this resonates —

If you care about the future, even if you’re frustrated with government —

If you work inside the system, alongside it, or are just trying to understand it —

I’d love for you to join me.

Follow along.
Subscribe.
Share it with people who should be part of this conversation.

And if you want to go deeper, we’re also building a Patreon community — a way to support this work and get behind the scenes as I travel and figure this out in public.

Government is the foundation of our society. What we build next will define the future for generations to come. What this looks like is currently being built by incredible people around the world.

Let’s go see where they are taking us.