LOTI: Weeknote 30
Preparing for IoT in a Week Sprint
Last week, we spent much of our time planning for our upcoming IoT in Week Sprint, which takes place next week from 2–6 March.
The main purpose of the week-long sprint is to help London boroughs to identify and address some of the key questions that underpin their approach to using internet of things (IoT) technologies in streets and other public spaces. You can read more the challenges for London and how this week of activities aims to respond to them in this article.
The main event is a conference at Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre on Monday 2 March, where we’ll be discussing three key themes with contributions from some experts from the field.
Our first panel will consider the question: How can boroughs make informed decisions about which IoT technologies can help deliver their desired outcomes? featuring:
- Sarah Butler — Digital Greenwich;
- Graham Colclough — UrbanDNA;
- Steve Turner — Arup; and
- Phil Saw — Infrastructure and Projects Authority.
Our second panel will explore: How we can ensure that IoT data delivers real insights that benefit the whole of London, featuring:
- Paul Hodgson — GLA London Datastore;
- Neil Hoose —Imperial College London;
- Professor Andy Hudson Smith — UCL CASA; and
- Miranda Sharp — Ordnance Survey.
Our third and final panel will ask: How can we deploy IoT technology in a way that engenders citizens’ trust?, featuring:
- Tom Symons — Nesta;
- Lauren Sager Weinstein — Transport for London;
- Gavin Summerson — CPC Catapult; and
- Olivier Thereaux — ODI.
On the Monday afternoon, we’ll be inviting participants to share information that could help us respond to specific questions under each of those headings.
On Tuesday-Thursday (3–5), we’re seeking volunteers to join research groups that will help address each question. If you’re interested in getting involved, please read our Briefing for Research Group Participants. At the end of the week, we’ll present the week’s findings at a public Show and Tell on the Friday, 12–2pm, again at Coin Street.
Some days are completely booked solid, but there’s still a handful of spaces left on other days, so please register your interest on Eventbrite soon to avoid disappointment.
Putting Data Collaboration Into Action
There was also plenty of activity on our Data Collaboration workstream.
Following the recent workshop held by our Brent colleagues Peter Gadsdon, Rehana Ramesh and Matthew Lloyd on How to Innovate Responsibly with Data and AI (covered in our last weeknote), we’ve shared a write up of what was discussed.
We’ll shortly start planning for workshop 2, which will explore how public sector organisations can embed the best AI guidance into their policies, processes and governance. If you have examples of organisations that already do this well, we’d love to hear from you.
We also held some planning meetings for four projects that aim to use data to directly improve services and outcomes for Londoners. These include:
- Working with Special Educational Needs (SEN) Transport Leads to explore the potential for data to help them improve route planning of SEN bus routes;
- Exploring the role of Universal Credit data in helping boroughs better support vulnerable families before they end up in crisis;
- Creating an open data pan-London database of all Electric Vehicle charging points;
- Helping boroughs learn from each other in their work to predict the locations of unlicensed Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs).
For each project, we’ll be experimenting with running a ‘discovery in a day’ workshop to bring the relevant colleagues from across boroughs together to establish what needs to be done, and how data might play a useful role. For those, we’ll be using the four step framework that Eddie sketched out in a previous article.
Other things we got up to:
- Eddie and Omid Shiraji presented to the London Financial Advisory Committee (LFAC) on the role of Chief Financial Officers in supporting digital innovation.
- We caught up with Paul Maltby, Chief Digital Officer at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and explored some areas where LOTI and MHCLG might work together.
- We visited Kieran Read, Director for Strategy & Engagement at the London Borough of Ealing to hear more about the borough’s plans for digital and their plans to hire more digital apprentices.
This Week
Coming up this week, we’ll be focused on two main things:
- Holding final planning meetings with the GLA Smart Cities Team for the IoT in a Week sprint.
- Running a workshop with SEN transport leads to explore the role of data in making their work better.
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