Sprint notes #11
Covering 8–21 July
Join the Local Digital Declaration celebrations
On 27 July, we’ll be hosting a virtual event to celebrate 2 years of the Local Digital Declaration. We want to say a special thank you everyone that has helped make the last 2 years possible, and to celebrate the hard work and achievements from across the Local Digital community!
We’ve got a great line-up of speakers, including a keynote address from Simon Clarke MP, Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government, a digital showcase from a selection of our council signatories, and an update on the future of the Declaration from the LDCU team.
If you haven’t done so already, you can still register to attend.
There’s also still time to join in our celebrations by sharing your council’s story — you can find all the details in this engagement pack.
The Local Digital COVID-19 Challenge closes
Applications for the Challenge closed on 15 July and we received a total of 125 applications from 94 councils! The team has been busy sifting through the applications and held panel interviews with the shortlisted project teams this week.
We’ve received so many brilliant ideas for digital solutions to post-coronavirus recovery, and we can’t wait to share the final funded projects with you.
Cyber
The cyber team held two ideation workshops with external stakeholders. During the first workshop, ‘Opportunities and Problem Exploration’, we reviewed the findings of the discovery and identified the biggest problems and opportunities. During the second, ‘Ideation and Solutions’, we considered solutions to the opportunities and problems we identified in the first workshop, and decided which candidate solutions to promote.
We’ve now performed 37 user research sessions during discovery:
Looking ahead, the team will be busy recording their findings, evidence and recommendations into a capture document and preparing for the final Show & Tell on 31 July 2020.
An update on our Funded projects
Income Management System
A recording of the Income Management System (IMS) team’s third Show and Tell is now available to view, and includes details of their user research, technical architecture and latest prototypes. They also share some of the results from the survey that was sent out a couple of weeks ago, discuss council priorities for an IMS system, and touch upon what a future system governance might look like.
To catch up on the team’s work from the first 2 sprints, read their sprint notes or watch the recordings.
Reducing Invalid Planning Applications
The Reducing Invalid Planning Applications (RIPA) project held their third Show and Tell. They focussed on mapping validation requirements for the project councils and building Application Programming Interface (APIs). You can see what the API currently looks like and watch past recordings on their project log.
Lastly, you can also follow the project on Medium and Twitter!
Housing Repairs
The Housing Repairs project has selected a delivery partner that will work with them for the next couple of months. The project is looking to officially kick off at the beginning of August, so they will spend the next couple of weeks bringing their supplier up to speed to ensure they can hit the ground running when the project starts.
Back Office Planning System
The Back Office Planning System (BoPs) project has published their latest sprint notes, where you can read about what they’ve been up to in the past four weeks, and a recording of Show and Tell #7. Spoiler alert — the system is really coming along! They bought a new domain (bops.services) and tested the prototype for full planning permissions.
Take a look at the system for yourself by going to https://beta-bops-design-prototype.herokuapp.com (username: unboxed, password: magic)
They also published a blog post about their experience of using the GOV.UK Prototype Toolkit in their project.
Drupal Code Sharing
Work presses ahead in the Drupal Code Sharing project, which is now into its 6th sprint and is beginning user testing with content designers from the participating councils.
In a new blog post, Oliver Hannan of London Councils reflects on why Drupal is the right web publishing platform for them, and the unique opportunities this project presents.
OpenCommunity Project
Buckinghamshire Council are basing their directory of community services on the OpenReferral UK data standard. Britt Wood from FutureGov shares some of their recent work in this blog post.
Other Events
Digital Insight and Business Intelligence in Local Gov 2020
May-N was a guest speaker at a virtual TechUK event on 9 July. You can find a recording of the event here.
TechForce19 showcase
On Friday 10 July we held a call to share an update on some of the winners of the TechForce19 challenge. If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch a recording of the event here.
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