(This is based on a talk which I gave at the recent mySociety Company retreat) Summary This is a future-based look at the chaos and complexity of local government. We are a very centralised nation but we are becoming more localised in ways which change the nature of the complexity that people have to deal…
Author: jonathanflowers
Is “Localism” to Blame for Brexit?
An edited version of this blog first appeared in LGC shortly after the Brexit vote. Some of the trends that we celebrate as localist – taking decisions closer to the people they affect, uniting people within the bubble of their place, creating effective but smaller groups of people – these trends of fragmentation seem similar…
On Being Ignored
This is a slightly adapted version of my blog which was published by LGiU here. It is the run-up to the EU referendum. Two voices are speaking, but not to each other: Voice Number 1 – “I’m really frustrated and don’t know what to do about it. The vast majority of people I know and trust,…
Free is a Curious Price
This is where I may get torn to shreds by some people I really like – Open Data folk. For the last three decades, since my early qualifications in Operational Research, through my consulting and public and private leadership roles I have been fascinated by the role of data and analytics in helping make the…
“Dark Value” in Public Services?
We are used to the idea of “dark matter” as the name of the precisely quantified but undetectable proportion of the universe that has to be there for current physics theories to make sense. By analogy* Geoff McCracken writes in a book of the same name about “Dark Value” – the hidden value – that…
Why Ideology Eats Evidence for Breakfast
A Bioengineer called Guru Madhavan gave a talk at the RSA this week pointing out that it makes sense to apply the tools of rational disciplines, like engineering, to the field of public policy. He gave some examples of (what others would call) user-centred design, systematic and multi-criteria decision-making. I got this stuff with my…
Four Futures for Health and Social Care Integration
A few months ago I wrote a structured future scenarios piece looking at four (deliberately extreme) possible futures for health and social care integration. (There’s also a little teaser video about it). At the heart of the paper is consideration of how the future will evolve in terms of uncertainty on two key dimensions…
Immediate Reflections on the 2015 Solace Summit
I shared my immediate reflections on this year’s Solace summit in the following tweets which, to be clear, contain my personal views and are framed partly as provocations, the provocative nature often enhanced by the character limit! Reflection 1: Devo will give birth to people-place-changing awesome 21st C Municipalism (except where it miserably doesn’t) Reflection 2: *Evidence* is…
Take-Aways from #LocalGovCamp 2015
Consolidating my thinking and in a spirit of sharing … The Right Conditions for Digital Paul Brewer (@pdbrewer) pitched a session about the Right Conditions for Digital (see his blogpost) based on his experience at Director of Digital and Resources at the very interesting Adur and Worthing. This could have been a longer session. Paul…
Devolution: The end of Localism?
(This is a bit of thinking out loud in an entirely personal capacity) In future times as we look back on the process of devolution now beginning, we may see that this was the point at which localism came to an end. This may seem contradictory – surely devolution is a decentralising force and therefore…
Why do we Reinvent the Wheel – The #UKGC15 write-up
I pitched a session at UKGC15 to try to explore the issue of why some innovation happens from scratch rather than being a case of adopting and adapting viable solutions developed elsewhere. I was motivated to do this from my experience as a member of the Service Transformation Challenge Panel where we saw quite a lot…
The Maturing of GovCamp and an Iconoclastic Suggestion or Two…
So, 24th January 2015 (also known as “yesterday” on a special one-day-only limited offer) was UK Govcamp 2015. It was really good, in all the ways that such events are good, and not so good in ways where … it could be a bit better. In some ways it is maturing well, in other ways some…
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