My recent focus on working in the open has very much been on my personal journey and, as such, primarily blogging with a bit of text based social media action. For the most part though what people practically want is advice on how to get started and what other options are there to be more open – particularly at a team rather than individual level.

For useful, practical advice for teams getting into blogging you can’t go wrong with Giles’ work on Doing Weeknotes and Blog Formats (and buy his book.) 

Here are a few other open options that I think are powerful and effective;

Public roadmaps

Ross at Public Digital has written about the power of public roadmaps and I agree that they are a really great communication and expectation management tool. Done well they build trust and steer conversations better than almost anything.

They’ve gone out of style a little, partly because they are quite a bit of work and create very public commitments which can scare risk averse leaders.

The NHS App roadmap demonstrates just how worthwhile it is though – and if something that high profile can do it – why not you?

Design histories

The Department for Education folk introduced (I think) and popularised (for sure) the practice of open Design Histories. Documenting the problems teams are investigating, the methodologies used, the insights gained, the evolution of designs, trade-offs made all in the open provides an incredibly useful repository of learnings that are so often valid for other teams.

Github

There is a bit of an ongoing pushback about coding in the open in public service quarters. Some security issues have a bunch of folks in a tailspin and teams are retreating back behind the private corners of Github.

That said the open opportunities go beyond the repos. Teams like MHCLG’s Planning Data have made great use of Github’s Projects, Discussions and Issues functionality to engage with their community in an open and transparent manner.

Meetups 

Public speaking can be scary for people (even lunatics like me who decide to do keynotes!) but there are smaller, friendly meetups like Data Bites, TransformGov Talks, ProductTank, DeliverSessions, ServiceDesign Bristol and so many, many more that have built in audiences of curious people who are just waiting to hear about the work of your teams – and in my experience the more niche and nerdy the better.

Opening up Show and Tells

You see a lot less of this these days – again I suspect it is a pressure thing – but I’m a big fan of the open show and tell. Doesn’t have to be huge but opening things up beyond that first or second ring of the Team Onion, inviting other teams and even users to listen to the team talk about the work ‘live’ is really compelling and with a bit of decent facilitating can really be a useful way to gather feedback and thoughts and widen the team perspective.  

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I’m interested to see if teams embrace more Audio and Video options to share their work – especially podcasts and (security concerns permitting) things like TikTok! Also to date there isn’t much evidence of teams embracing Bluesky to share their work in the same way that people did on Twitter at one point. Maybe those days have passed.

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