LOTI: Weeknote 19
City Tools
Last week, we published a blog — City Tools: shining a light on the technologies powering London’s boroughs. The blog outlines our plans for this new database of local government technologies. Our immediate next step is to hold a series of workshops with our member boroughs to identify areas where the current data can provide value and support collaboration on procurement. The first of these will be held on 3 December.
As well as boroughs’ procurement leads and CIOs, we’re keen to engage with the private sector and have invited TechUK to represent their views at the workshop. We’ve also extended an invitation to the GLA’s Economic Development team, to progress our collaboration on their GovTech project, as well as the Crown Commercial Service.
We worked with Paul Hodgson, Senior Manager of City Data at GLA, to publish the raw data behind City Tools on the London Datastore. This is now available here.
Barcelona Smart City Expo
Onyeka spoke alongside Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London, at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona.
We shared how LOTI is developing processes and tools to better enable London boroughs to collaborate on their use of data to meet Londoners’ needs. We took questions from the audience about how LOTI was managing to work within the fragmented nature of London’s local government sector, our outcomes-based methodology, and the Greater London Authority’s future plans with the London Datastore and the Transport for London (TfL) project.
Life on Mars
Meanwhile, Eddie was in Singapore at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Festival of Ideas 2019. There, he met with senior figures from their Government Digital Service and gave presentations on government use of Artificial Intelligence, creating digital public services and designing public services for Mars.
The latter formed the basis of a three-day intensive workshop attended by 17–22 year olds from over 15 neighbouring countries. Eddie was on the judging panel for presentations from nine teams who competed to come up with their best vision for Mars public services. The thought experiment was intended to show how even our most basic assumptions around the purpose and nature of public services can be challenged and rethought.
Assistive Technology (AT)
Back on planet earth, we got to work drafting a prototype AT evaluation framework that could be tested by social care leads in member boroughs who would be trialling ATs. This is still very much a work in progress!
In the process of creating a template, it became apparent that in order to capture the points raised by participants at our recent workshop, a guide would need to be created that would complement the framework. We are in the process of drafting that guide, which will take the user through some key points that they’ll need to resolve to ensure that their evaluation is as thorough as they need it to be.
This week, we’ll be sharing these with social care leads and inviting their views on whether this meets their needs and how we can develop both the framework and the accompanying guide.
Information Governance (IG)
Lastly, we further developed our 7-Step Information Governance Overview. Using guidance created by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Data Security and Protection Toolkit created by the NHS and the Local Public Services Data Handling Guidelines, we drafted definitions and outlined the responsibilities of the different IG roles in LOTI member boroughs. We met with Emily Salinger, Information Governance Lead at London Councils, to get her opinion on which of these roles are needed at each stage of a data-sharing project.
Coming up this week
This week we’ll be:
- Running our last All-Member workshop of 2019.
- Holding our first-ever Advisory Panel meeting.
- Preparing for our two City Tools workshops with Omid Shiraji (Interim Chief Information Officer for Camden) and Paul Neville (Director of Digital and ICT for Waltham Forest).
You can follow LOTI’s up-to-date progress on Twitter.
