Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

295 – Seven Practical Stories in a Free E-Book

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Every so often, along comes a free AND useful publication.

Purpose, Public Value, and Service Design in Local Government – Seven stories from Nova Ratio Publica by Stephen Thorpe is a good example. Drawing on 30 years of leadership experience in local government in Victoria, Australia, the e-book provides seven easy to understand public service stories to help you improve your work.

Thorpe explains how he has overcome some big challenges. Inside the e-book you’ll find practical ways to think and act differently, including:

  • Managing for value to move a conversation from operational gripes to strategic leverage.
  • Aligning public value, legitimacy, and operational capability so good intentions can be delivered.
  • Designing operations for the visible signals that tell people a place is being cared for (especially when resources are tight).
  • Service blueprinting to map services end-to-end, anticipate fail points, and build recovery so services are safe-to-fail at go-live.
  • Accommodating variety by designing a menu of service options that fit different household circumstances.
  • Understanding system capability to understand what a system can actually produce, and why setting targets outside capability will damage capability.
  • Purpose-led improvement in statutory services by focussing on the applicant experience drivers so that statutory measures become a consequence, not the method.

Inspired by Mark Moore, W. Edwards Deming, John Seddon, and other systemic thinkers, Thorpe has thought deeply about the challenges that he and others experienced at work. He has then looked far and wide for theories to explain what he was observing to help him learn and improve.

Permeating each of the stories is the idea that when service purpose is defined in terms of what the customer, resident, applicant, or service user needs and expects, the right measures of performance and the right method for delivery become clearer. In comparison, when purpose is defined by what the organisation wants to achieve, report, or control, effort gets misdirected, and demands rebound as rework, complaints, and escalations.

The e-book has been written for councillors, executives, service managers, and improvement practitioners. Download the e-book and read these stories if you are tired of plans that promise more than your organisation can deliver.

Download free from Nova Ratio Publica

285 – Our first podcast: Challenges, solutions and future directions in local government.

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1800 words (18 minutes reading and/or 20 minutes listening) by Colin Weatherby

I recently found out about Notebooklm and asked it to analyse the entire Local Government Utopia website and answer a set of questions about challenges, solutions and future directions for councils.

The question and answer is below. First, a bit about Notebooklm.

Notebooklm

Notebooklm is a new AI product that takes a specific source or sources nominated by you and provides a summary, or answers to questions you ask about the source or sources that you have uploaded. I loaded the URL for localgovernmentutopia.com but could have loaded pdfs or other types of sources (or combinations of sources). You can load up to 50 different sources with a maximum of 500,000 words.

The person who told me about it had uploaded a manual for their camera as a source and then asked how to change the camera battery. Instead of leafing through a massive pdf manual online, Notebooklm explained how to change the battery with a link directly to the relevant section in the manual!

It also produces podcasts, primarily to help listeners understand complicated topics by hearing a discussion between two people about the source or sources. I was interested in this feature, so I had a go!

Podcast

I asked Notebooklm to make a podcast addressing this question using the Local Government Utopia website as a source:

“What does Local Government Utopia say about what a local government putting the wellbeing of its constituents first looks like; what issues are important and currently not acknowledged in local government; what are current research or policy gaps in local government; any thoughts around recent Commonwealth or Victorian parliamentary inquiries into local government; and finally, what thoughts are there on where public policy might be able to make a meaningful contribution.“

Here is the podcast.

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259 – Model Collapse in Local Government: A Performance Measurement Dilemma?

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700 words (8 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the concept of model collapse is a well-recognised challenge. Now it is potentially reaching into my everyday life if my Spotify-generated daylist starts to select songs from a previous daylist! Yet, my concern isn’t confined to personal playlists, and it should be echoing through the corridors of local government and raising questions about what performance measurement actually tells us.

Carole Parkinson’s question at the end of her footnote resonates with me: How can we detect model collapse in local government? It may well be a moot question, and model collapse is simply an explanation of the current situation, as one of Carole’s colleagues suggested.  This should become apparent if ChatGPT’s methods to identify model collapse in AI are accurate. Five seem particularly relevant for the local government context:

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258 – Model Collapse or Cultural Evolution? Mental Models and Victorian Local Government

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700 words (8 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

In many aspects of human endeavor, the belief that successive generations inherently improve holds true. Take sports, for example, where each Olympics sees records shattered by athletes who are better selected, trained, and conditioned than their predecessors. This continuous improvement is driven by a powerful incentive for each generation to surpass the achievements of the previous one.

However, this upward trajectory doesn’t always apply. In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), there’s a phenomenon known as model collapse. Without diverse human-generated training data, AI systems risk malfunctioning if inundated with AI-generated content. The first generation of AI benefits from drawing on decades of human ingenuity, but as subsequent generations draw from their own created information, the pool of new ideas dwindles, resulting in a homogenised output.

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