LOTI: Weeknote 17
City Tools
In advance of our public launch of City Tools on 13 November at Big Data LDN, we met 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 and agree on the outline for our workshop which will be held on 3 December.
Providing better data on the systems that power London’s local government services is just the start. City Tools can make a difference if it complements boroughs’ procurement processes, systems (IT and otherwise), policies and internal cultures. We discussed who needs to be in the room at that workshop to help us uncover the use cases that might best demonstrate the value of the data/tool in its current form and future use cases that might inform the tool’s future development.
Our intention is to unpick how we might:
- Enable better joint procurement conversations between boroughs
- Help boroughs to support each other with advice and/or technical capability
- Enable better engagement with suppliers, particularly SMEs
On the last point, we will continue working with the GLA’s Economic Development Team to inform the development of their new procurement platform for tech SMEs to ensure that it integrates with City Tools.
If you are interested in attending the launch on 13 November, please register here.
Assistive Technology (AT)
We met with Priya Javeri (Director of Technology & Innovation at OneSource) to plan our AT workshop agenda. Our AT workshop with Newham will be held on the morning of 13 November.
We shared the progress we had made on LOTI’s research on Assistive Technology evaluation frameworks.
Our primary goal is to develop a common approach to evaluating AT pilots so that results from trials in one borough can be fairly compared with those conducted in another.
Internet of Things (IoT)
We ended last week with a 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 our IoT project.
We’re fortunate to be able to build on a significant amount of previous work in this field. Through the GLA’s leadership of the Sharing Cities initiative, we have access to around 70 IoT use cases, together with evidence on their impact and business cases. What’s missing is an agreement about the standards around their implementation and use. Perhaps the most significant questions concern boroughs’ approach to IoT data. We agreed that there’s a future we definitely want to avoid by design: each borough having its own, closed IoT networks, collecting data in inconsistent standards that can’t be shared, and with citizens in the dark about what is being used and why. We’ll be reflecting on these questions over the next week and planning a project that responds to those challenges.
It was a lively session as we tried to think about how to distil where LOTI could add the most value.
Digital Apprenticeships
On Friday morning we met with Cate McLaurin from Hackney to review the latest version of the Digital Apprenticeships Playbook. Tower Hamlets and the GLA will be trialling the use of this Playbook over the coming weeks so that we can get their feedback and update the document before the end of the year. We likewise welcome comments and ideas for its improvement from readers of this weeknote.
Coming up this week
This week we are:
- Launching the first version of our City Tools at Big Data LDN.
- Supporting Socrata to host a Data Analytics Use Case Masterclass in Camden.
- Supporting Priya Javeri at Newham to host our Assistive Technology Workshop.
