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The start of a localGDS?

Yesterday was the first LocalGov Digital Makers (LGMakers) meet, in Guildford. It was an event that Ben Cheetham, Dan Blundell and I organised to show some of the Makers Project Team pilot projects but more importantly hear people's views on collaborative working and get them involved in LGMakers.

The event was only open to those working in local government  (I wrote why here) and around 40 people from 25 councils attended.

For me the event confirmed there's a growing desire amongst those working for local governments to do things differently. This is heartening, as given the diminishing funds councils have at their disposal, increasingly local authorities have to stop doing things or find alternative ways of doing them.

With Makers Project Teams, by using existing tools such as GitHub, Trello, Slack, Twitter and creating a few more (they'll be more about the pilot projects in the next couple of weeks) council digital teams would share their work, where common aims and local user needs.

Rather than working independently on building a similar thing, or worse, spending taxpayers money on buying the same product in each council, teams would work together, not through a formal shared service but through the sharing of their skills using digital tools.

Is this unworkable? Perhaps, but that's not the impression I got yesterday and if an initial group of makers can start to build things together for others to use then this would not only prove the case, it would also start to provide a catalogue of re-usable digital services.

Is is unscalable? Let's consider that if it happens. We've seen a lot of talk about a Local Government Digital Service (LGDS) in the past couple of years so perhaps some pooled administration resource might be needed in the future to help manage the tools that Makers Project Teams use.

What if someone takes and doesn't give back? Generally Makers Project Teams would be making things that they'd be doing anyway, just together. Also, if someone takes 100 things and only gives 1 back, that's still 1 more thing. To start with anyway, everyone has to give as there's nothing to take.

The can-do mentality showed yesterday said to me, along with a Change Academy this could be the start of LGDS, not advising or criticising but concentrating on getting stuff done differently. Follow @LocalGovDigital, @LGMakers or join the G+ Community and start to get involved, whether you work directly for a local government or just have an interest in making local services better.

I'll end with Dominic Jones' tweet, that really says it all:

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