Council digital teams - have we stopped innovating?

simon gray — 2017-10-05, 16:15:41

Way back in November 2013, as part of the project to improve Birmingham  City Council's website I was leading on, I wrote a blog post speculating on a few ideas which might be coming up in the Local Government digital sector in the coming year; at the time of writing I didn't expect I'd be likely to be implementing any of the ideas myself, because at that point my project was principally an information architecture and content strategy project, we weren't at that point expecting to be in a position to improve the underlying technology behind the site. So these things which I predicted somebody else might do were: 

• Open data, 
• Mobile, 
• ‘The Internet of Things’, 
• Responsive Design, 
• Ebooks, 
• Crowdsourced content, and 
• Real time information 

So when recently I was copying the old blog posts from the site for that project into this site, that original post caught my eye – in the sense that I was moderately surprised that nearly four years on, actually not much has changed. 

Let's examine those predictions and what's transpired over the last four years: 

Open data 

Open data in local government is still a niche area; yes, many councils now have their data portals with a handful of datasets on them, but they tend to just be token efforts so the councils can say they're doing something with Open Data, rather than the rich datasets that are being exploited by enthusiasts, activists, and third party agencies to do something useful with. I think it's still a vicious circle – councils are reluctant to put in [...]

Read the rest of Council digital teams - have we stopped innovating? .

Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines

simon gray — 2015-09-30, 17:12:37

I went to the Wednesday session of Wuthering Bytes, which was called Tomorrow’s People, exploring the future of public service provision and how councils, SMEs and individuals can work together. It was quite a departure from the usual local government technology events I tend to go to in that the topics were more of parallel relevance to my usual job rather than of direct relevance – but that said it was still of use for me to take back to work tomorrow, especially the talk about Open Source Circular Economy Days. It was also an good reminder to those of us who’ve become accustomed to the unconference / Open Space Technology format of events that it’s not the format of the event which makes it good or bad, it’s the quality people who turn up to speak at it.

I’ve not written a prose account of the day, instead, here are my bullet-point notes from the sessions, which may or may not be relevant to people outside of the context of the event itself:

Kathryn Grace – Digital Occupational Therapist – Digital tools and dementia

• Dad had a sensor which can send a text to a carer if he’s left the gas on
• NFC check-in and check-out on mobile phones for carers
• CareZone iOS app for logging all relevant data for his care and medication; also caring.com

Dan Powers – IOU Theatre – The role of the artist in developing technology

• ‘As a society we implicitly understand the value of play and the imagination’ – Brian Eno

Read the rest of Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines .

In group Public / Third Sector Digital