A couple of weeks ago we opened our new office in Bern. It's big, it's beautiful, but.. necessary? We think it is. So while the team at it's lovely location in the middle of town is already hard at work on some of the most promising public sector innovation projects, let's take a look at a core piece of text we worked with deciding to make the commitment to Bern:

Our democratic institutions and public services clustered in Bern all face tremendous challenges facing the digital acceleration businesses and society are experiencing. As digital becomes a key component in actually implementing policies, the ability to deliver solutions that are secure, scalable and sustainable becomes central: a functioning democracy needs policy implementations that work.

We want to provide that capability to deliver. We want to build public interfaces that are simple, beautiful and easy to use. That are open, transparent and inclusive. For that we need to make the important things simple again, we need to be brave enough for radical approaches,  and we need to seriously engage.

This belief, our focus on service and experience design, our commitment to open technologies and capability to innovate across disciplinary boundaries is giving us a unique position in  Bern and its developing civic technology sector.

Our serious commitment to agile methods and individual empowerment enables us to excel in a public sector in which so many digital projects fail tragically. Those projects are rarely underfunded or underplanned. They stall under the weight of too much talk and not enough action, too many strong presentations, not enough strong implementations. So we will be builders, not talkers: The strategy is delivery. Delivery of citizen-centered technology that works for all, that empowers participation and enables policy.

Life is short. Work on stuff that matters.

That text still resonates with me, and we'll sure take it out from time to time to remember to focus what _matters. _If you'd like to join us in this mission: you can. If you'd like to know more, talk about projects, public sector service design, open data, or the next big thing: please get in touch.