We said in December that we had big plans for 2019. Starting today, we’re building a global network of affiliates who can help us work in more places, more of the time.

We’re starting small, with a few affiliates based in the UK (but willing to travel). But it’s the start of something much bigger – over the next few months, we’ll tell you about our affiliates on every continent. We have to be global, because our work is global. We want brilliant people on the team, no matter where they are.

When we started Public Digital in 2015, we took things slowly and focused on a few clients. In 2018, that changed, and we started hiring a team. This is the next step.

Our affiliates are people we trust and respect. All of them are experts in their field, all of them have worked at the sharp end in a variety of governments and private sector roles. Some of them we know from our previous jobs at the Government Digital Service and the Co-operative Group; we have worked with them before, and we know we can trust them to deliver. Others are people whose reputation is so strong, we knew we had to invite them to join us. All of them share our goal of adding value, by adding values.

We’re building the network to be flexible: it can adapt and respond to our clients needs, as rapidly as those needs change. It gives us more options to deploy skilled people around the world.

Starting small means we can iterate, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Not least because running a network like this is new for us, just as being part of it is new for its members. That’s why I’ve joined the Public Digital team to manage the network and help it grow in a way that’s manageable for us, while meeting our clients’ needs and helping them adapt their ways of working to the internet era.

The first affiliates are:

• Dafydd Vaughan, digital technology specialist
• Dan Sheldon, healthcare specialist
• David Kershaw, agile procurement specialist
• Emily Webber, agile and digital delivery specialist
• Ivanka Majic, user researcher, service designer and service manager
• Jamie Arnold, lean and agile delivery specialist
• Kate Tarling, designer, strategist and service design consultant
• Kevin Humphries, consulting engineer and enterprise architect
• Sarah Richards, content design expert
• Stefan Magdalinski, expert on startups and internet companies

There’s more information about all of them on our new affiliates page.

More affiliates will be joining us in the coming months. We’ll tell you about them soon.