I'm writing this piece after reading Hetan Shah 's excellent article in The New Statesman, AI will not magically solve our public services and contributing to a short discussion thread on Bluesky , which by the way is one of the many reasons why Bluesky feels like Twitter did 10+ years ago, which is a good thing. I should preface this by saying first I don't have a view on Tony Blair, and we're already doing at lot with AI where I work, from predicting where potholes will appear , to using a translation service developed by Swindon Borough Council which is saving tens of thousands of pounds a year, to drafting things like job advertisements , which I use as evidence that I'm certainly not against the use of AI in the public sector. Hetan's piece neatly summarises the hype. It also describes from where that hype might be emanating, the lofty expectations and risks of using AI in the public sector, and what the public sector should be using AI for right now. Am
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