LOTI: Weeknote 16

Onyeka Onyekwelu
Nov 4 · 4 min read

Information Governance

Another busy week for us at LOTI HQ. We started off our week at Camden Council, supporting Ed Garcez, Fozlu Miah and Sudip Trivedi for our latest LOTI Information Governance workshop. The objectives of the workshop were to test the recommendations made at our first workshop and to: 1) fully engage DPOs and IG Leads in LOTI’s work on responsible data sharing, 2) identify specific actions to improve the IG process for pan-London data sharing projects, 3) present the Information Share Gateway as a tool available for London’s public sector.

The workshop slides and the full summary is now available to read.

GLA GovTech Project

On Tuesday, we started our day at Nitrous’ offices in Old Street to meet with the GLA to discuss their GovTech project. Nitrous gave a demo of their wireframes which featured boroughs’ procurement journeys, feedback functionality, their SME friendliness ranking, and a list of available tendering opportunities pulled from open data sources.

We were interested to see the potential for GLA’s GovTech project to overcome some of the challenges shared by SMEs at their earlier workshop in week 15. Every one in three pounds that the government spends should be with SMEs, but the reality is very different.

We want to ensure that GovTech integrates with our City Tools database. To that end, we shared the City Tools’ taxonomy of services.

LOTI’s City Tools’ taxonomy of services
LOTI’s City Tools’ taxonomy of services

The intention is to adopt this so that SMEs can tag themselves to particular lines of business and increase transparency around procurement and service delivery. We will be launching the first version of City Tools: London on 13 November at Big Data LDN. If you’d like to join us at the launch next week, then please register here.

Borough Visit

Following our GovTech meeting, Eddie visited Neil Williams, Dave Briggs and Opama Khan in Croydon, concluding our borough visits.

They shared the progress of Croydon Digital and their Digital Service Roadmap, and their understanding of LOTI’s role in supporting them to achieve their goals. They were particularly interested in getting involved in our Internet of Things (IoT) and Assistive Technology (AT) projects. For the IoT and AT projects, the intention is to test out our Shared Experiments workstream by trialling new ways of working, operating models and technologies in different LOTI member boroughs.

Digital Apprenticeships

Meanwhile, Onyeka headed back to host the first Digital Apprenticeships Managers’ lunch at LOTI HQ. The full slides are available here.

LOTI’s first Digital Apprenticeships Managers’ Network Lunch
LOTI’s first Digital Apprenticeships Managers’ Network Lunch

As part of our work to offer at least 100 digital apprenticeships in LOTI member boroughs by September 2020, we’re committed to supporting Managers who are responsible for designing, recruiting and supporting digital apprentices in LOTI member boroughs.

The lunch was fairly informal and was an opportunity for the Managers to meet their peers in other boroughs and to engage more directly with this project. After grabbing some food, they were invited to share their experiences of making a business case for recruiting, managing and supporting digital apprentices in their boroughs. The lunch provided a forum for them to raise any questions or concerns they had about the scheme, and suggest how LOTI could best support them to achieve our desired goal.

The full summary of the lunch is available here.

London Datastore Discovery

On Friday, we spent the morning supporting the Open Data Institute (ODI) to run their GLA London Datastore discovery workshop with those who publish, share and use data in LOTI member boroughs. This LOTI London Datastore project is sponsored by Paul Neville (Director of Digital and ICT for Waltham Forest) and Trevor Dorling (Director, DG Cities Limited, Digital Greenwich and Smart Cities lead at Royal Borough of Greenwich). The discovery aims to find out about London Datastore’s users and their needs, the data, governance and technology that is already being used, and what the requirements of the end product may be.

Our workshop’s objectives were to 1) understand what we’d like to do with our collective data, 2) identify what barriers prevent us from doing those things, and 3) explore how the London Datastore might help. The workshop slides and the full agenda is available to read online.

ODI is currently running two other workshops for current users and publishers of the London Datastore. If you would like to contribute to their discovery phase but cannot attend any of their workshops then please do complete their survey online.

Coming up this week

This week we are:

  1. Meeting with Omid Shiraji (Interim Chief Information Officer for Camden) and Paul Neville (Director of Digital and ICT for Waltham Forest) to plan our next steps on the City Tools project.
  2. Meeting with Priya Javeri (Director of Technology & Innovation at OneSource) to plan our Assistive Technology workshop.
  3. Meeting with Ben Goward (Chief Information Officer for the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea), David Grasty (Head of Digital Transformation for Kingston and Sutton) and Nathan Pierce (Programme Director of Sharing Cities) to plan the next steps on our IoT project.

loti-ldn

London Office of Technology & Innovation

Onyeka Onyekwelu

Written by

loti-ldn

loti-ldn

London Office of Technology & Innovation

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