Sliding into half term week with getting practical reboot activity started at LocalGov Digital, checking out LocalGov IMS and thinking about the place of music journalism in the modern age
3 things for this week
Here’s 3 things that I’ve been up to or had on my mind this week.
LocalGov Digital: the reboot
Having announced last week that I’m taking on being chair for LocalGov Digital while we reshape the network I’ve started to get into the first practical bits to actually get that underway this week.
This has meant trying to work out how things work in the current set up (note to self: documentation isn’t a bonus but a necessity), spending more time in the depths of the Slack channel, Carl spotting some useful stuff around governance, and planning the next steps.
Those next steps will include sorting out the governance – I know there are others who are keen to be involved in actively reshaping the network – and opening up the conversation about who we are, what we do, and the role we can play for the sector.
It’s really exciting to be getting started on this and move back toward the original mission and away from being a Slack-only community.
LocalGov IMS
I was glad I was able to jump on the showing and sharing session this week about LocalGov IMS. It was fantastic to see the work Tailwind Digital (including my former colleague at Nottinghashire County Council, Tom Styles) had guided, with Local Digital funding, to bring this open source income management system into being.
Alongside set ups like LocalGov Drupal and Open Digital Planning, LocalGov IMS is another fantastic show of what the sector can build for the sector, and how we no longer have to be reliant on Big IT and its suppliers. In fact, that shows levels of organisational immaturity which should be worrying when the public purse is involved.
If income management in the public sector is your thing (either from customer experience, IT or finance) then definitely check LocalGov IMS out.
(These open source, community-led initiatives are exactly the sort of thing LocalGov Digital wants to help amplify, support, and go back to seeding, btw)
I am not the user
Always worth being reminded that for those of us working in user-centred design, we are not the user. We may be A User of a particular service or product – as a citizen, rather than only in our work capacity – but that does not make us representative of our users more broadly.
We should act as advocate (taking data and research to understand our user’s needs and then fiercely representing to get them met), but never a proxy. We know too much about how everything works now for our experiences to represent those don’t work in or around services, and while we might have accessibility needs of our own we are unlikely to be able to understand the lived experience of all who are accessing our services.
Ideally, we wouldn’t design without users involved in that process – not only as research participants but as active decision makers. Local government (generally) is still a way from that. While we work toward let’s keep reminding ourselves we are advocates informed by research, not proxies driven by our individual experience.