Friday footnotes is a weekly list of links related to product management and design in the ‘internet of public service’ curated by @jukesie

[1] Good culture evolves from the bottom up from Stephen Foreshew-Cain the guvnor at GDS these days. This is a great, and honest, post about the importance of letting culture emerge including some examples of steps that GDS have taken to nurture that emerging culture.

“Your job as a leader is to provide the right environment in which culture can emerge and evolve all by itself”

[2] Why you aren’t getting the best digital staff and what you can do about it by Paul Boag has him riffing on one of my big obsessions (you might have noticed) — how to actually hire good in-house teams at places not really known for their digital prowess.

[3] Supersized. Making design work in large organisations has Ben Holliday musing on the importance of design thinking to ensuring that big institutions succeed with the challenges of ‘transformation’ so many are facing and warns designers to avoid anywhere that doesn’t take this need seriously.

[4] You don’t have my permission is by Jason Fried of Basecamp fame and talks about the lessons he took away from reading ’Turn the Ship Around’ — which weren’t that different from what I learned from the book except he is CEO of Basecamp so his opinion counts 😉

[5] Digital Service Standard assessments discovery gives Zuz Kopecka the opportunity to update us a bit about the work she and the Service Assessment team are doing to rethink the process — this is incredibly important. The Service Assessments are both really vital and a massive burden at the same time but I trust the team working on this.

[6] The Forrest Gump of the Internet is all about Ev. Ev Williams that is. This is a long but interesting read about a man who has been behind three of the most important web services to me. Blogpost — which introduced me to blogging, Twitter — well you known Medium which after some initial reluctance has replaced WordPress.com in my affections.

[7] The GCHQ: Boiling Frogs report was given a tidy up this week by the Co-op Digital design team which was a timely reminder (combined with a long train journey) for me to read it. It is a hugely important document about approaching organisation change in this internet-era. It could have done with less jargon and an edit but it doesn’t make it less of a must read.