Having spent the winter quietly listening and reflecting on what the future of LocalGov Digital might look like with spring comes a season of renewal.
Real talk: overwhelm is real
In relation to LocalGov Digital it was somewhat unintended to take the last few months seemingly saying nothing after a bold statement of intent to reshape the network I co-founded more than a decade ago.
On reflection there were a few reasons for this but perhaps the biggest, and the least comfortable, is that the public sector communities of practice landscape is nothing short of overwhelming. What we saw all those years ago when we started this practitioner network, the energy of individuals to connect with others and collaborate is very much still there but now it has scaled up, gained pace in some ways and tangled itself up in others.
If the sector is a forest and each network, or community of practice, a tree then it’s easy to get lost within the crowded space. Or to find yourself stood on the boundary with an idea of where you want to be but no idea how to take the first step, or know you’re on the right path if you do.
Being able to understand this observation was one thing, processing how that made me feel was another, and recalibrating to shape LocalGov Digital in the terrain of this moment and not any map we thought we had was yet another.
The original mission: catalyse and collaborate
The challenge has changed.
When we began LocalGov Digital it was driven by the need to connect dispersed practitioners with a view to nurturing collaboration. The landscape was somewhat sparse and you could travel many digital miles without finding anyone on the same path. When we did find each other (a moment of remembrance for 2008 Twitter here and the Knowledge Hub please) it was natural, inevitable, that we would form a tribe and come to understand what our role was compared to the other tribes we found.
LocalGov Digital was the renegade band. We were constructive disrupters, the doers who were still trying to get a seat at the table. Agitators and agitated. We had seen the possibilities, felt the frustrations, and wanted to crack on with building better public services.
We JFDI.
The mission now: connect and amplify
That somewhat sparse landscape has become densely populated. How brilliant is that? The stuff we had to convince people of back in the beginning is now the centre of conversations. So many conversations.
There are so many networks, communities of practice and tribes now that knowing what is happening where has become a challenge exacerbated by there being a fracturing of social networks to share and connect. The conversation has spread across these different spaces and you need to be a member and across what is happening in multiple to get the fullest picture. And in these times of continuing to do ever more with ever less that can become hard even for the most motivated or disciplined.
Where does this leave LocalGov Digital? There have been moments where I considered whether we were relevant or needed in this landscape at all. Whether in the proliferation of networks we could just be adding noise and not value.
Reframing that led to the realisation of what the mission is now: to not only amplify practitioner voices, but to connect the in to other networks and communities. LocalGov Digital was once about connecting individual practitioners to each other – and in many ways that still holds true – but now it is also about connecting communities to each other.
What next?
There is still some shaping of this to be done – knowing wasn’t easy but it was perhaps the simpler part of the task. Working out how we fulfil that role, now that is going to be quite the challenge.
I’ve no intention of trying to work this out alone. LocalGov Digital is all of us. If you work in the sector and are passionate about building better public services then you’re a part of it, and you get to choose what that looks like to you.
If it looks like understanding the terrain and helping others navigate it, or facilitating connections between existing communities, or connecting and amplifying in other ways: fantastic! If it looks like keeping control of what you engage with where on a personal level, consuming as needed from a specific network or small selection: great! If it sounds like having a view which is different from mine, or Carl Haggerty‘s, or anyone else: as long as its respectful then that’s not just valid but welcomed.
For we are all LocalGov Digital: connecting and amplifying the voice and work of the sector’s practitioners. And we have much to do.
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Curiosity is the future
I was at a university open day recently with my eldest. In the welcome speech the provost reflected on how when he was at university it was about gaining knowledge, but that for this cohort they now had access to the sum of all knowledge via their phones.
The future, he said, was not about knowledge but about curiosity. Knowing what questions to ask and how to successfully sift the vast amount of information available to find the value, and being able to apply skills to do something with that information.
I rather liked that framing. And it seems rather apt given the thinking about LocalGov Digital in this moment too.