Week #9

Just an ordinary week

Rant

A little rant to start. This morning Deliveroo rejected all my payment methods and I’ve been unable to place an order. This is the second time it happens over the last 3 times I’ve tried to order something from them. They first tried to claim the problem was with my card issuer, which is clearly not (and the card issuer reports no declined or attempted charges). I know it sounds like yet another example of #firstworldproblems but this sort of issue really upsets me because of the sheer idiocy and dehumanisation of the automated mechanism. As customers, we have no recourse — whether it is Deliveroo, PayPal, HSBC, or whoever else, we’re left in a limbo, often with no explanations, unable to use services we take for granted.

Have I done something wrong? Is something fraudulent happened on my account? Is there a mistake somewhere? There’s no way to know, and this is incredibly worrying.

Also, I’m fine and healthy today, so ordering a meal wasn’t a big deal with me; what if I was ill and Deliveroo had been my only chance of feeding myself, though?

People

This was a very nice week full of interesting people. First of all, I welcomed Jamie to my team and had a few good catch-ups with him, trying to understand his views on the job and the Department, and what his desires are in terms of developments and tasks he’d like to work on. Meanwhile, our recruitment campaign for a Strategic Data Manager closed yesterday, and I’m very excited to be sifting for interview this week with my manager and Liz-Ann alongside others. I’m very happy with this as we have a broad set of skills and expertise — for example, my manager will bring in the seasoned civil servant understanding, Liz-Ann the digital and technical experience, and I’ll be the jack of all trades who bridges between the two.

I met with my friend and colleague Suzanne, who works at BEIS and is currently finding some difficulties with an open data issue. I’m trying to help, and I must admit a hint of personal pleasure whenever people ask me for help with open data :) It was great to have a catch up with David after about two years — the last time we’d met, I had interviewed him for a project at Power To Change, as my resident housing guru. It’s good that we’re now both civil servants, in two different department but with loads of potential overlapping areas of interest.

This week I also had a chance for a full hour chatting over a coffee with Paul, which is one of the best things anyone could do. Civil service, politics, tech, photography — I can’t quite summarise in a few words how refreshing it is to have a chat with Paul.

Things

A few things happened in the work/quasi-work realm. Firstly, I had an interesting phone conversation with the Moovit CEO, trying to understand how they use data to run their transport service. There was some progress on a few projects I’m following, including one about data cataloguing and one about discovery rail data. A good chat with two of our travel statisticians who are prototyping an API system resulted in some great insight on how we could work together to better data management practices, and got me to make intros to our friends at the ONS, who have extensive experience in putting statistics into data processes.

I had a good chat with my boss and Matt, the head of data policy, trying to understand how to best set the boundaries between our two teams and use our resources effectively. We work very well together, but we’ll trying to reduce some duplication and make sure we can attack the “transport data” problem from two angles: mine is definitely more operational than Matt’s, who’s more keen on regulation and policy making, and I’m a big believer that putting these two angles together works very well (as Andrew wrote a few weeks ago).

With my NHS Trust governor hat on, I attended the transformation committee meeting at Guy’s Hospital, where we discussed a few programmes, most of them estates-oriented. But we also had a good chance to scrutinise the new electronics health records project, and I went a little “rottweiler” and spawned an e-mail thread between governors and NEDs on how we can make sure that this works well for patients and medics.

Finally, I attended a very good Data Board at DfT and went out of it feeling very energised — a lot of work ahead, but it’s cool stuff!

Free time

Hanging out with Sarah & friends is always a pleasure, and doing so at one of our favourite bands, Rob Heron & The Tea Pad Orchestra, is great fun. This time round, they also had a Glaswegian support band, The Awkward Family Portraits, who happen to be playing at my local bar in month’s time!

After a long time I met Jennifer for coffee — she was the Deputy Mayor of Haringey who officiated at my citizenship ceremony. It feels like this happened a long long time ago, in many way, although it was only in 2015.

Oh, and Wales won :-)