Public service platforms with examples - F1 model and more
Next: Adversary Inspired Services
See also how empowering the unemployed can help solve unemployment problems
After discussing in previous posts about models and ways to make decisions, its time to turn the attention examples, what new stuff might the public side offer for the future.
Generals tend to fight the previous war and societies tend to solve old problems. There is enormous organisational inertia as large number of people are employed solving those issues. Even when everyone knows that automation might increase service while reducing costs in some areas, very few individuals proactive seek to find ways to make themselves unemployed. For politicians these are large voter groups that one simply needs to keep happy.
That’s why external input directly from affected people for example in the form of Citizens’ Automation Budget are needed. Once such schemes have obliterated much of current public spending, a lot of resources are freed. Funds can be given back to citizens as automation dividends and/or freed resources used to solve current problems or improve life.
Public Service Platforms
Societies are platforms themselves. Laws, police and the judicial system create trust and help people and companies to do business with each other. If foul play is detected, one can trust to get justice in most cases and in many countries.
If platforms will rule the day in future, the idea comes naturally to mind that the public side could act as a digital platform provider themselves. This does not mean that public side starts implementing a lot of platforms from ground up.
One way to avoid re-implementing what already exists is to buy up some of the existing platform companies (there are many even in areas where a few large ones dominate), then add the secret-societal-sauce so that worker rights are respected, user privacy laws are followed, counterfeit products are not sold, products don’t contain cancer causing chemicals and taxes are collected.
These common platforms can be open sourced, so citizens and enterprises can use their “automation budgets” to further improve them – add stuff that is important to them. Investment in development becomes available to all (typically by pooling resources), and everyone has a level playing field. The platforms could be run on any commodity cloud, no need for governmental clouds really. The operations of such software platforms could also be purchased from a private organisation. In other words, the public side can fund common goods, but does necessarily have to take the operating responsibility of them.
What would these platforms do? Let’s take a few different examples.
Employment is currently under change and it is unclear how work is organised or how work organises itself in future but it is clear that careers will be shorter within a single employer, people need to learn new skills throughout their life and there are lots of opportunities for earning money by selling directly own skills through various methods. To help this, society could offer:
Free access to leading online learning platforms. Learn anything and get credentials at any phase of your life.
Free CRM and ERP systems targeted for individuals and small teams to be able to sell and manage customer funnels, control procurement and own manufacturing etc. This can be either commercial or open-source variant. There could 3-5 vendors that have a contract with public side. Pick one and use or if you like something else, get your “platform voucher” out and use to pay for some 3rd party alternative.
Platforms for spinning up long running or pop-up enterprises (ideally with a single swipe of finger)
Around health the society could offer:
For health the society might offer everyone the services of a health operator. Health operator is a service that offers both a virtual clinic where you can get advice at any time either by automated systems or by people. They can also offer motivational programs for healthier lifestyle. This means online diagnostics based on your wearable and other sensors is available 24*7 and various programs for keeping you in good condition.
Machine learning models for medical imaging and other health related analytics. As example: take a picture of a rash and get immediate diagnostics and recommended next step.
In education:
Platforms on education could mean that all material for the mandatory education is accessible. Teaching could be done by recordings, games, simulators or there could be a computer-generated synthetic teacher with eternal patience to answer your questions. This teacher could even look like you. You could be teaching yourself material you have never heard of before. This would allow people who did not pay too much attention in their tender youth to later fix the omissions when they have slightly matured or anyone else to study if they cannot attend in person due to a medical issues, age or preference.
Around personal finances:
If households are starting to have extreme amounts of debt jeopardizing the health of economy, the public side could incentivize savings. A simple gamification is where people saving even modest amounts are eligible to a large random reward (say a year’s salary is raffled every week among savers). Other (unrelated to finance) gamifications can also be though for generally beneficial actions such as driving according to speed limits or reporting broken public infra like streetlights but these may have a patronizing feel, taking away agency from citizens or causing undesired actions like breaking things so they can be reported for reward.
In logistics
In rural areas people might use automation budget to develop a drone-based delivery system. This could be utilised to deliver goods and post packages to them. Combined with automation on health side people’s prescription would get renewed and get delivered to home door automatically. During free time the drone fleet can be rented out doing surveys like detecting where there is snow on grid lines or monitoring air quality or detecting starting forest fires – in other worlds earning money enough to keep themselves airborne. Combined with hyperspectral cameras such a drone fleet can create a complete 3D map of an entire country.
Drone delivery in turn would benefit from an air control system. A system that plans drone routes and schedules their flights to prevent accidents and to make sure that if a fault happens during flight the drone lands in a safe place; i.e. routing drones over water and unbuilt areas, follows them during flight etc.
To help logistics operations a common logistics platform could allow anyone owning a single van or truck to provide similar service level than big logistics companies. A shared platform that calculates available space, plans optimal route for deliveries, follow routes in real time allowing customers to follow deliveries, sends notifications to customers etc.
Maps and imaging as platform:
The logistics and drone platforms also need high quality map data. Governments already have this data and could open maps for free use to local platform providers. The platforms could be open so that users can add data on different layers on them (points of interest, commercial company information). For many use cases high-quality 3D maps are also useful. For example planning mobile network rollouts needs 3D data if detailed radio propagation calculations are done. One can naturally do plans with ballpark data as well but quality is better with detailed information.
Open 3D map data has other uses as well. With maps it is possible to predict for example pollution levels on each street. When one knows pollution level from a few places from high quality meters, wind direction and 3D map of the city, it’s possible to accurately predict winds and to see how pollution or harmful substances move after an accident. This helps rescue units to focus on right spots.
3D maps are an example of a database as a platform. Many others such as satellite images that can be used to detect environmental offences like ships dumping oil to the water, overfishing, illegal landfills, shipwrecks or detection of environmental issues like draughts or pest infestations or human catastrophes like armed forces attacking civilians or monitoring progress like construction of major infrastructure elements like roads, harbours and so on.
Log records:
Project and financial databases would tell among tother how development aid projects are progressing and after completion to keep track on how well it benefits the communities around as motivation for donors. This data can be published making it a platform.
Data gathered for statistical purposes can be used to create personalised inflation index based on the products that you use, not some statistically picked basket of goods that’s done through an expert review. The benefit of such indexes is that they are not subject to political sensibilities.
Public here does not mean that there must be only one platform. Nor that the platform is necessarily open sources. Society might well have contracts with commercial providers to provide services and these do not necessarily have to be very expensive. For example office tools (word processors, spreadsheet type of stuff) is about 6 euros per month.
Implementation options
You might get an impression from above that the public side organises these services by having contracts with private providers and sometimes being the organisers itself.
The alternative to this is naturally for the public side to offer service vouchers. You would get a yearly voucher for health-related service platforms with freedom to select the one that suits you best. This gives agency back to the individual. The platform concept here does not replace actual medical care that you get when you get sick but is to provide real time remote analytics for next step to take, inform professionals when there are weak signals of serious issues, adjust your personalised medications, answer any quick questions. motivate for small changes towards health etc.
A hybrid model is one where the system mostly works through vouchers but in areas where procurement requires specialised know-how, the buying is done in more centralised manner.
User-Centered Services
Life does not respect organisational boundaries. Public services get created over time by independent decisions and are provided by different public organisations. Each organisation is responsible just for their individual functions. Citizens need to be aware of organisational structures and what is the right liturgic expression mentioned in law to invoke various public functions.
A major life event touches several public services and many private services. If the intent is to help people, services need to start from the point what user and what their need is rather than from organisational structures that reflect bygone era and political sensibilities and compromises at that time.
As an example, If I get fired, the most important immediate question for me is “can being p*issed kill me?” not “what does this mean to national economy?”. A service around this life event could be organise around:
Emotional aspects - dealing with shock. Online course how to deal with the emotions of disappointment, anger and fear.
Information - How does a job center and the public process work for newly unemployed? What possibilities and responsibilities I have? What happens next?
Automations dealing with the bureaslavic aspects - registering to job center as a job seeker, unemployment benefits process etc.
Training path. Services telling me what types of alternate jobs people similar to me have successfully applied for or re-skilled for. What additional courses or training I would need to apply for similar open positions? Training and help if I want to start my own business. Voluntary mentorship if someone who has been in similar situation wants to help
Open positions. How many suitable positions available within reasonable travel distances? What are salary levels? Prediction for opening new positions. applying with a single swipe, reminders in calendar to call for further info something picked my interest.
Automated analysis of my CV and application with suggestions for improvement or even automated CV generation for me with different styles to choose from.
Own plan.
Networking with people in same situation and sharing experiences
Afterwards. Ask for improvement ideas, ask if person wants to be mentor for someone in similar position later
Similar services organised for all major events like starting a business, building a house, having a baby, divorce, getting seriously ill etc.
When services get re-organised around needs, the gaps between services become self-evident.
Detailed example (F1 support model)
Let’s take the previous example a step further. How would you go about building a new type of service for the unemployed?
Three different ways to do this come to mind: front-line empowered, crowdsourced and F1 support team.
Two categories of people that do have deep understanding of the unemployment situation are former long term unemployed, who have managed to motivate themselves and find ways to get out of the quagmire and front-line workers in job centres.
Services today are based on guidelines coming from central sources like laws prepared in ministry of labor and operational models from somewhere up in the hierarchy. From people who have not been unemployed or seen one live.
What if front-line workers could organise themselves into small teams and experiment locally with different approaches to seek for the best models. In this alternative the role of management would be to collect the best approach and distribute them nationally plus naturally reward the best teams.
Another approach is to crowdsource employment services. Any formerly unemployed could act as a mentor and if this person helps anyone to find a permanent job, they would get a compensation out of the taxes paid by the newly employed. Say 5% in the first year, 10% in the second year and 20% in the third year. The incentives would be set so that the higher paid job and the longer this person stays employed, the more compensation the mentor gets.
A different, digital approach can be developed by looking how Formula 1 drivers achieve their best performance. All F1 drivers have very comparable skills and the differences are done mostly on the mental and to lesser degree health side. The driver with the best support team wins. Usually a comprehensive team is gathered around them that has total responsibility of all aspects that affect performance: medical and mental parts - preventing diseases, maintaining physical condition and recovery after a race (sleep, rest, relaxation).
The core for achieving great performance starts by really clarifying to oneself who you are and what you want out of life. Many athletes have depression after a career as they have defined themselves via success. Same condition threatens many unemployed – loss of friends and meaning. Everything starts by finding out what the person wants out of life. This can be done simply by asking the persons age and where they want to be in a few decades (“your 47 now, in 23 years you’ll be 70, where do you want to be then and what you do today to get there?”)
When own values and aims are not in line with what one does, no change is permanent. You do not know who you are nor what you want. Without this there is no permanent motivation. Without motivation, no success. Also, physiological changes start with the mind.
A digital transformation approach would be to start by forming a F1 support team (best experts in the world) around a set number of volunteering unemployed and build similar total support approach to see how well it works and how it needs to be fine-tuned.
If this works and people get jobs, some of them might want to train themselves as coaches to help other unemployed people with the same method. This would scale the approach. Over time when experiences are gathered, parts of this approach would be automated and provided by apps so that the same team can support a larger set of people.
The rest is just digitalising more parts that seem to work via an automated approach, training more peer-coaches to cover all unemployed who want to try this out and finally rolling out the service nationwide to any unemployed who wants a virtual F1 support team on their side.
And if such a F1 life coach approach works for unemployed and disillusioned people, it would quite likely work for anyone. So the automated parts can be made available in general.
Final approach would be open-sourcing the results and going global.
(This final F1 approach has taken inspiration from the approach for F1 level performance described in the book: Oskari Saari, Aki Hintsa: The Core - Better Life, Better Performance)
Next: Adversary Inspired Services
See also how empowering the unemployed can help solve unemployment problems