Skip to main content

LocalGovCamp 2024


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 over the next month. In the afternoon Paul Funnell took over, with he and his team running sessions on some of the amazing things they've been developing at Powys County Council.

What I thought worked really well was the combination of students, who generally had more knowledge of the theory behind AI, and the council officers who generally had far more practical experience of using AI. 

25 September 2024 - Social

If Birmingham is the spiritual home of LocalGovCamp then Manzils is where LocalGovCampers eat and as usual Manzils didn't disappoint the forty or so of us who attended. 

Obviously discussion there is very much off the record, and on a far wider range of topics than just local government, but I can say I had a both an enlightening and amusing chat with someone sitting next to me who worked on DCLG's "50 ways to save" back in the day., as I believe the kids say nowadays.

It was great to catch up with Carl Haggerty too. I'm sure I speak for many when I say they'll always be a place for you at LocalGovCamp so don't stay away for so long next time!

26 September 2024 - Main Event

As in recent years, the morning featured predefined sessions, with the afternoon as the now traditional unconference format the event was founded on. 

AM

The first session I attended was run by Lisa Trickey, Sarah Slate from the Local Government Association and myself, and was part of the work Kafilat Akintoye and I have being doing with the LGA on adoption of the Service Standard. 

I found being able to workshop this with a group in person was really valuable, and it'll feed into the recommendations from the LGA and LocalGov Digital to be published soon.

Next up was Gavin Beckett from Placecube on build vs buy, the middle ground of low-code platforms, and using open source. This again is a topic  that's relevant to work Kafilat Akintoye and I are doing with my team, on the wider process of how new digital services come into existence.

Finally for the morning was Kat Sexton and her team from Birmingham City Council on amazing work they've done to create the Foundry. As with previous sessions, it provided some great insight into a process around the creation of new digital services.

PM

The unconference sessions were in the afternoon and the first I attended was a joint pitch from Sarah Peña of Wokingham Borough Council and myself. Anyone who has followed her work around AI in local government will know she's not just a thought leader but delivers on those ideas too, so I was happy that we ran this session on a shared library of engineering prompt for councils together. Watch this space for something on that very soon.

The second session was pitched by Ben Cheetham on what how Local Digital can help local government, which was combined by the unconference organisers with another pitch about views on being hopeful or sceptical about the future of local government digital. We're at a pivotal point, not just in local government digital, but for the future of service delivery by councils and it was amazing to hear others' viewpoints and be able to share some of my own.

Unfortunately I had to skip the third session to catch my train, but by that point after two days ideas and innovation I think my brain had enough anyway!

In Summary

Huge respect to Nick Hill who puts LocalGovCamp together every year. 

Thanks also to the sponsors who make it free to attend every year through their generous contributions.

Whilst online events have undoubtedly made collaboration, quicker, easier, and cheaper, there's nothing like being in the same room as others to facilitate learning and the sharing of ideas, and kick-start collaboration, from time to time.

So here's to LocalGovCamp 2025; I'm looking forward to it already.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and
5 comments
Read more

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to
6 comments
Read more

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it
1 comment
Read more

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h
1 comment
Read more

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit
1 comment
Read more