Conversations with other digital folks: September edition

On Monday I hosted the September edition of the (now-monthly) session I am running to give digital practitioners the chance to meet each other, and compare notes on what's interesting / difficult / confusing.

Here is a bit of a summary from this month's conversations. Several themes cropped up across the discussions:

Experimentation vs caution. People working in digital tend to learn by trying things whereas funders, and senior leaders, tend to want certainty before agreeing to anything. Someone shared an example of an AI pilot that worked well on a small scale, then stalled because of wider questions about policy, rights and competing priorities.

The way things are funded produces a lot of hidden work. In the gap between one pot of money and the next, somebody has to keep the things running, and that's usually someone whose job description doesn't cover it. Several people argued that digital should sit in the day-to-day budget alongside staff costs rather than being funded as a series of projects - which is something that I've covered in both the Beyond the Promise and The Hidden Cost reports.

Too many demands on one thing. A website might be expected to sell tickets, host an engaging archive, educate people about an artform, and serve every audience, on a budget that could maybe do one or two of those jobs well. As a result, organisations often avoid the hard conversations around deciding who or what a project is actually for. Someone shared the story of a delayed launch - they made the point that "an arbitrary date does not make something good", and that telling a leader "this will be embarrassing if it breaks" can be more persuasive than an argument about quality.

Getting buy-in. People shared some practical tactics like show colleagues a better process instead of describing it, report on your work using the figures leadership that already tracks, and look to delegate and give other teams access to the tools, even if that makes you nervous at first - "it's easier to make a plan for if something goes wrong, rather than let that stop you from getting others involved".

At the end I asked what people for reflections on what they were taking away. The most common comment was around the realisation this stuff is not only a problem for each of the individual organisations represented (something I also heard last time). Others reflected that hidden labour is real but needs a clearer explanation for people outside the digital team to take seriously, that digital is infrastructure across an organisation, and that digital teams are not changing and evolving at the same rate as the technology. One person said that hearing someone else talk knowledgeably about things they recognise made them feel less alone.

The sessions run monthly under the Chatham House rule, with a maximum of ten places so everyone can contribute. If you would like to join one, sign up to the newsletter. The next one will take place in late October.