For each of the last two weekends I have been with folk who were giving up their weekends for a purpose. One was in Birmingham: localgovcamp, an unconference of (generally) younger UK local government folk, enthusiastic for internet-era change. The other was in Lausanne: a gathering of Alumni of the Institute for Management…
Category: Camp
Scrutinising Digital
I had a chance at the recent LocalGovCamp to find some like minded souls (including the wonderful Dave McKenna) with whom to explore a question that has been interesting me for a while: how do you reconcile 21st Century approaches such as Agile with the 20th century style governance that exists within local authorities. For…
It’s About the End User, Stupid! … No! Not that one! The TICTeC blog
TICTeC is great. The world is better for having TICTeC in it. It provokes delight, wonder and thoughts. This blog is mostly about the thoughts! TICTeC is The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference and the third one was held last week (25-26 April, in Florence). It is funded thanks to sponsorship from Google and the…
Notes from TEDxSkoll
Some thoughts immediately after attendance at TEDxSkoll in Oxford on 7th April. Wonderful new website of the day http://www.dailyoverview.com/ and @doverview – go look! Food for thought of a digital variety: understanding that some of the standardised algorithms for face recognition simply don’t recognise black faces because they were omitted from the training set –…
A Partial Slee List of UKGCX
In the absence of time to do a proper blog, my (truncated to 45%) Slee list for UKGCX is as follows: 1. I was pleased with my session about the structural tensions between “agile” and “public sector governance” which has been recorded pretty well here with some practical suggestions. I was struck by the differences…
“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…
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…
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…
#UKGC13 – Notes on Session re Big and Small Companies Innovating Together
At UK Gov Camp 13 I pitched the idea of a session about “How Big and Small Companies could Innovate Effectively together”; about 20 people came along and whilst I think it’s fair to say that we did little other than scratch the surface of the subject I undertook to record key points that did…
Themes from the LGC Summit
I attended last week’s LGC Summit, held in Marlow, with many senior local authority folk, a few sponsors, and an impressive speaker list. So what did we learn? As ever from these events the learnings are a mixture of points of detail and some broad themes – I’m going to try to capture the wider…
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