Our Chair Carl Haggerty looks back on the last two years and outlines what coming up
It has been roughly two years now since LocalGov Digital came together – in my personal opinion we surpassed our original aspirations at the very first meeting when so many people committed to doing something together and we were blown away by the interest and momentum which came through at this years LocalGovCamp – it does prove that grassroots collaboration can and does work.
LocalGov Digital has also won Best Collaboration at the inaugural Comms2Point0 UnAwards. Sarah Lay has written a very good post on “We are all LocalGov Digital” which I think explains best what we set out to achieve and how everyone is key in that.
Anyway, here is a bit of a reflective post – what is localgovdigital, why we do what we do and a look back over the last two years and a look ahead…
What is LocalGov Digital?
Simply put, we’re a bunch of volunteers from local government and its partners who care about delivering brilliant user focused public services, enabled by digital where appropriate. Some of us are techies, web geeks, data crunchers etc and some of us aren’t. What we all have in common is our passion for improving public services. We pride ourselves on the fact that we’re a genuine practitioner network that gets things done for citizens in our localities.
The LocalGov Digital pledge:
We have adopted a Think, Do, Share approach to work and this focuses us on making sure that we actually deliver value on the ground, no matter how small, our approach encourages us all to think differently, do differently and share that widely across the network to help and support others.
The LocalGov Digital value:
Our underlying ethos is that local public services should be Open by default and Digital by design.
What we have done:
Since we formed as a network in September 2012 we have:
What we are actively working on:
We are going to continually share and show people how we did stuff, so they can steal and reuse it if it helps.
We know there is a huge amount of work to do and there are currently only a small number of us to get involved and help move things forward. So we have listed the areas where we have active people right now. However if you are working on something else and want to get involved in expanding the thinking, doing and sharing then get in touch.
1. Skills and capability – does the sector have the skills, capacity and capability to deliver real change in public service delivery?
We’ll do this through:
2. Democracy – is the sector supporting its decision-makers to understand and promote digital service delivery?
We’ll do this through:
3. Making – helping define best practice and joining up the creation and sharing of design and development of digital services, where common aims and local user needs align:
We’ll do this through:
What we’re not going to do:
What we know we need help with:
Do you want to get involved and Join us!
We know how many people there are out there in local government and beyond who feel the same as we do about creating real and sustainable change in public service delivery.
We know there are loads more people who could easily sign up to the LocalGov Digital principles, because they’re already working on transformational service redesign enabled by digital. If that sounds like you, then take our pledge to think, do and share with us. Real change comes from within.
3 simple steps to getting involved
Getting involved with the LocalGov Digital Steering Group
We operate on the principle that people earn their way into the steering group through thinking, doing and sharing activity and providing local or regional co-ordination.
If this sounds like you, get in touch and share what you are doing.
