LOTI: Weeknote 14

Monday

We began our week by attending a London Councils’ meeting with those who lead on the provision of Special Educational Needs (SEN) transport services in London boroughs. Croydon and Newham shared what is considered to be best practice in a London context: Croydon uses assistive technology and tailored programmes with the support of partners like the Metropolitan Police Service and Transport for London to run their independent travel training scheme. Newham uses contactless payment cards and regular meetings with parent groups to inform and support their direct payment model. It was interesting to learn more about boroughs’ schemes and the group’s intentions to collaborate and scale these models.

After that, we held a call with Ben Goward (RBKC and Westminster), David Grasty (Kingston and Sutton), Nathan Pierce (Sharing Cities) and their colleagues to kick off LOTI’s Internet of Things (IoT) Standards project.

This project begins with a head start: several LOTI boroughs are already doing amazing work with IoT, and the GLA has a huge amount of resources and expertise to share on around 70 city IoT use cases from their participation in the Sharing Cities programme. Our aim is to identify 10 high-value use cases that LOTI boroughs wish to test and develop further. These cover a range of interests and themes for boroughs, from smart street lighting to smart street furniture, with a particular focus on the most investable options. Considering the project is named IoT standards, we would also need to define what we mean by “standards”, given that we have an interest in technical standards and also approaches to architecture and use of IoT data.

Tuesday

We had a call with Nick Swanson of the Greater London Authority (GLA) Economic Development team to discuss how LOTI can work with them on their GovTech London project. The GLA has recently completed tenders for a number of initiatives to make it easier for SMEs to navigate London’s complex public service landscape. One will help companies understand which types of service are run by which organisations. Another will help them navigate and understand the different procurement frameworks in use.

We will continue working closely with Nick and his team, to follow the progress of his project and ensure the GLA’s efforts integrate with our City Tools project.

Later on Tuesday, we met with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) at the GLA to discuss their work on data and information governance. Among other things, we learned from them about modern technology’s ability to facilitate or design out crime. Experience has taught that useful public provisions like providing free wifi spots as part of smart street furniture can occasionally be misused by criminals looking for a way to communicate anonymously. Considerations like these will help to inform the design and cybersecurity element of our IoT Standards project.

We ended our day by sharing our LOTI Progress Dashboard on Twitter. This will be our way of sharing live updates on all our projects and living by our radically transparent mantra.

Wednesday

We spoke with Omid Shiraji (Camden) to plan the launch of LOTI’s City Tools, supported by Bloomberg Associates, on 13 November at Big Data LDN. For the first time, using a common framework, we will be revealing the technology landscape that underpins the diverse and complex service delivery of London’s local authorities. City Tools highlights a range of potential benefits and opportunities for London’s boroughs to collaborate, driving out the cost and inflexibility of legacy technology to improve the ability for boroughs to enable change. This information will be shared on using an online dashboard providing real-time data on technologies, contracts and much more.

Following our kick-off call last week, we shared Croydon’s plan for a tech roadshow with our LOTI member boroughs. This stimulated some discussion about what was currently being provided by other organisations and what LOTI could run by way of a programme to engage young people in digital careers.

Thursday

We contacted the Information Governance (IG) leads in our member boroughs in an effort to encourage high-attendance at our IG workshop on 28 October at Camden. We hope to work with the Data Protective Officers (DPO) and IG Leads in our member boroughs to improve the process for pan-London data sharing projects on LOTI’s future projects. It’s important that we have as many views as possible in the room to really challenge and test our thinking.

Friday

We weren’t able to meet with TfL to discuss the future possibility of a pan-London technology and transport project with themselves and LOTI. This meeting is being rescheduled.

We did meet with Fozlu Miah and Sudip Trivedi (Camden Council) ahead of our IG workshop to finalise the agenda and plan for our workshop with Information Governance Leads and DPOs in LOTI member boroughs.

Later in the day, we met with Paul Neville (Waltham Forest), Trevor Dorling (DG Cities and Greenwich), Sarah Butler (GLA) and Deborah Yates from the Open Data Institute (ODI) to discuss the content of the LOTI / ODI London DataStore workshop on 1 November.

We agreed on the objectives of the workshop:

1. Explore where LOTI member boroughs are now — what open and close data do we already share and what are our current capabilities?
2. Scope out our vision — what would we like to be able to do with our collective data?
3. Identify barriers — what’s preventing us from achieving that vision?
4. Agree on solutions — what role might the London Datastore (and the team behind it) play in enabling our vision and addressing the identified barriers?

Coming up this week

This week we are:

1. Attending GLA and TechUK’s GovTech London Roundtable with SME’s and London’s public sector to understand and simplify the processes and practices needed to enable collaboration and increase SME’s access to the market.
2. Continuing to meet with those responsible for adult social care services in LOTI member boroughs to inform our Assistive Technology project.
3. Meeting with Mikko Rusama, Chief Digital Officer of the City of Helsinki, to learn more about the implementation of the Helsinki City strategy and their wider use of digitalisation.