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Absence makes the heart grow fonder: LocalGovCamp 2022

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it wasn't until I left this year's LocalGovCamp, held on 29 September in Birmingham, that I realised just how much I'd missed the event and some the familiar faces I'd still been talking to online, but not seen in-person for over two years.

Encouragingly there were also many for whom this year was their first, and it's their passion and new ideas help that keep LocalGovCamp alive.

There were three main I took away from LocalGovCamp 2022.


We're still talking about collaboration in silos:

Encapsulating the problem in microcosm, there were a number of individual sessions in separate rooms asking, why can't local government collaborate and work together more. 

This isn't a criticism of the event, the topics at LocalGovCamp are driven by it's attendees, but it did highlight the need for more joined up thinking round this. 

That said, there are some promising signs around collaboration, but more on this later.


Open Source vs Low Code:

Two schools of thought became apparent. Firstly, building services and applications in a propriety low code environment and making them available to use by other customers of that vendor. Secondly, building services as individual open source applications and making them available to re-use by anyone.

There is no right answer to this, and whilst I'm very much an advocate of low code (remembering that low code isn't no code), because trying to develop and then support an individual, stand-alone digital product for the hundreds of services local government offers just isn't a cost effective route to take, there are common, reusable products that can be integrated into a low code digital service.

A new model for collaboration and delivery:

The most encouraging thing I took away from LocalGovCamp 2022 (and a show and tell the previous day) was, despite my first observation, actually how much the green shoots of collaboration are now showing, due largely to funding from DLUHC's Local Digital imitative but also with assistance from the private sector, enabled by that funding. 

Although individual councils have developed some great digital services over the past few years, with many there hasn't been an internal push to white-label or scale them up for use across the sector. 

The approach largely seems to be that that DLUHC provide the funding and therefore take some of the financial risk of failure, the private sector provide the community management and technical resource for an individual project, with collections of councils providing the insight into user and business needs.

This model seems to be working, the delivery of products is in progress, and there seems to be growing interest in working together to solve common problems, or fix the plumbing as DLUHC might say.


Well done to all involved in organising this year's LocalGovCamp (especially Nick Hill), here's to the next LocalGov Digital event.



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