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...

Back in January 2024 I asked, does the Service Standard work for local government. The answer appears to be no. A combination of co-organising  a workshop , co-creating  a survey  (both with the Local Government Association (LGA)), reviewing the  qualitative research of others , running un-conference session, and having conversations with local government colleagues, civil servants, and suppliers over the last six months has led me to this conclusion. In that time I've not found a single council that fully uses the Service Standard. My key findings as to the reasons behind this are: Lack of resource: Most councils don't have, and some will never have the multi-disciplinary teams needed to implement the Standard on their own. It's just not economically viable to employ a Service Owner or Product Manager, User Researcher, Lead designer, Technical Architect or Lead Developer, and a Performance Analyst in some councils, particularly smaller districts where digital teams...

To say the ”do we need a local GDS debate” is a slow burner would be an understatement, but recently it’s ignited again, just as it did before the 2015 General Election. I’ve been compiling people’s thoughts on it for the past 13 years , and looking back through them, what’s striking is that the debate hasn’t moved on a great deal in a decade. In fact some of the same issues Carl Haggerty talked about in 2012 are still being discussed today. So let’s think about what’s actually being asked. The majority of digital services offered by councils are procured from and provided by the private sector. Whether you’re looking for a planning application, reporting a pothole, searching for a social care provider, or applying for a school place, you’re probably doing so through something built and supported by the private sector. Even the growing number of councils building services themselves using low-code are doing so through a proprietary platform supported by the private sector.   Whils...

Content designers, we need to talk, and you might not like what I have to say. Just over ten years ago, I wrote a piece on  how to reduce visits to your website . Even then the concept wasn't new, but with the emergence of large language models over the past year, it's become even more relevant today. Over the past decade years, you probably found an increasing number of people obtained information about your organisation online via a third party. First through the growth of social media, and then personal assistants, mainly on smartphones and speakers. As a result we've had to think about how content will be delivered through different media and therefore design it differently. For example, here's Richard Copley asking Google Assistant about school term dates in West Berkshire in 2017. It works really well Phil. This is entirely about content rather than code, is that right? pic.twitter.com/AGQF4aR21S — Richard Copley (@Copley_Rich) December 31, 2017 In the next few y...

A few years ago along with many others I had a small part in helping draft the Service Standard , a replacement for both the Digital Service Standard and Local Government Digital Standard . Four years on, whilst the Service Standard has been adopted by some digital teams within local government, my far from extensive research failed to find one council where it has been full adopted across their entire organisation, although some elements have been in some larger councils. So why is that?  Perhaps it's because the Service Standard describes how services can be built by the very few public sector organisations where large fully multidisciplinary teams of user researchers, services designers, content designers, UX spcalists, developers, and so on exist? In reality, for local authorities such as smaller districts which make up the majority of councils in terms of numbers, that kind of team will always be unobtainable. The second factor is that no matter what size the council, there i...