LG/WWW

2024's LocalGovCamp was held on 25 and 26 September at STEAMHouse in Birmingham. Below are some personal notes and refilections on the event.  25 September 2024 - Hack Day The hack was back. Whilst there had been a hack day in previous years, most notably the local democracy hack in Leeds in 2015, it had taken a break for a few years until 2024.  The 2015 event saw the participants leave the venue and roam the streets conducting guerrilla research on real people for an hour in the afternoon, and as an organiser part of me feared no one would return; thankfully they did. This year, somewhat predictably we covered the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), and attendees were a mixture of local government officers and students at Birmingham City University, whom we managed to keep in the building for the duration of both sessions. In the morning I ran a session on creating topic based assistants, something we've been doing at West Berkshire Council which you'll see more about

Last week I was lucky enough to share a stage with Daljit Rehal, Dinuka Wijesinghe, Dr. Laura Gilbert, and Yatin Mahandru at  Public Service Data Live to talk about deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in government. As one of only three speakers throughout the day working in local government it was great to be able to fly the flag for councils across the country and some of the amazing work that's happening within them. I made the point that when compared to central government departments, councils offer a far wider range of services but at a smaller scale, which means they're perfect to act as incubators for innovation, in this case around the use of AI. Like many I'm a firm believer that when it comes to technology, the best change is often incremental, which got me thinking about the next small step we could take to join up and accelerate the testing and deployment of AI in local government, particularly generative AI. If you're not aware of the distinction betwe