This week was all about LocalGovCamp North and this weeknote is going to be a scrappy collection of thoughts on that.
Firstly I want to recognise the amazing work Nick Hill does with these events. Not only does he pull together a brilliant, thought-provoking agenda full of practical takeaways and sharing from people doing great stuff in the sector, but we always have the pleasure of a great venue and him setting the perfect energy through the day. Organising events is hard and I can only applaud Nick for both making it look easy and consistently delivering such excellent days.
3 thoughts on LocalGovCamp North
Here’s my 3 main takeaways after spending the day away from the office at LocalGovCamp North in Leeds.
Tired but wired
It’s a day that has left me both tired (I need significant quiet time to process and rest after in-person events) and wired (so much thought-provoking stuff shared and conversations had that my brain is pinging what feels like a thousand ideas a minute).
That means I’m not confident this post will make as much sense to others as it does me, but also that I get the familiar juxtaposition of being energised and positive about what can be done on the micro and macro levels to build better public services, while also knowing the reality is this change is still contained in pockets and not consistent or system-wide.
Finding your tribe, collaborating, sharing, being supported through solidarity – all of this is vital if we’re individually and collectively going to have the endurance to really make significant and lasting change. LocalGovCamp – and LocalGovDigital – is a community where you can find this (not the only one of course) and there’s lots to do to understand its role and make sure it can continue to support practitioners at a grassroots and strategic level.
Focus on people even when we’re talking technology
This is something I’ve been reflecting on a lot over the last couple of weeks. It is easy to focus on the tools and tempting to jump to solutions to make use of them. So much is lost in doing this – the hard work is understanding the problem, and in all the work we do the most important thing is remembering this is about people.
Never more so has this been more important.
People do not care about how cool your AI tool is – they do care about whether they can find and access what they need in ways which make sense to them. This might include speaking to a human, not a chatbot. While it might not be front of mind as someone navigates a situation or tries to complete a task value for money and efficiency is important. But – please – let’s frame everything as being about people, not about the technology we are using.
Collaboration is the key
Really great to catch up with a previous LocalGovDigital chair Phil Rumens and chat about (amongst other things) how collaboration between central and local government, as well as the various communities, networks and groups around them, and suppliers is really moving from conceptual to practical right now. That – finally – it feels like there is a chance to work together in mutually beneficial ways as one public sector.
LocalGovDigital has a part in this, as do each of us at councils (or wherever we spend our time and energy in the public sector) and the practical work is really gathering pace. For Phil this is looking at sourcing the stack for local government technology – which he pitched as one of the unconference sessions at LocalGovCamp North yesterday.
Stuff shared at LocalGovCamp North you should take a look at
- data maturity model from the LGA and the data maturity assessment tool from Data Orchard, as shared by Ben Proctor
- Local IMS – keep control of the customer experience in online payment journeys with GovPay whatever Income Management System is being used in the org, as shared by Tom Styles and Seb Dadbin of Tailwind Digital
- community led and sector focused CMS with LocalGovDrupal, as shared by Will Callaghan and others – it’s LocalGovDrupal week next week so take a look (whether this is your CMS or not) and get a feel for what’s already happening and what’s next up on the roadmap
- get your processes mapped so expectations are clear, you can manage what’s not going well, and you can measure what is – a great session from Kristin McIntosh
- pragmatic but ambitious, a great session from Anne-Louise Arkle on embedding service design and digital thinking in local government that resonated so much with what we’re working on in Birmingham right now
- use of AI tools to help business processes – not customer facing but for efficiency in the way we work. These were really thought provoking case studies on Hey Geraldine (a collab between Peterborough and Datnexa in the social care space) and a collab betweens Leeds City Council and Xylo. It left me with as many questions as it did possibilities for similar use but great to see something practical and more nuanced than ‘AI will save us (while also destroying us)’
- great stuff shared by Craig Barker on the platform approach they are taking with a comparison to the inter-changeable modular approach that Volkswagon took to early models. Got to say this landed the concept with me more quickly than anything else I’ve heard!
- stuff on cyber security, Gov.UK App design, and more – basically you should come to the next LocalGovCamp and get involved with this thinking and doing!