Week 11: Our week in tweets
Last week, the LOTI central team were out and about at various meetings with our members to discuss our summer and future projects, and to improve how we inform and connect our members with existing initiatives.
Tuesday
On Tuesday, we met with Cate McLaurin to talk through insights from our Digtial Apprenticeships user research and to agree our next steps.
We took the problems and potential solutions that apprentices and their managers had raised in interviews and reviewed and mapped them on to each stage of the apprenticeship journey. We were able to spot where borough leads and apprentices might benefit most from content Hackney will draft in a future Digital Apprenticeships Playbook, and also spot gaps in our knowledge that would require further research. This exercise was really useful because we have since contacted member boroughs with experience of managing Digital Apprentices that would help us to fill those gaps and to avoid bias.
So, what’s next? We still have a few more interviews to conduct to make sure we have a well-rounded picture of the challenges that face our members. Afterwhich, we’ll meet again with Cate and Rob Miller at Hackney to share the latest insights so that they can design the playbook’s outline.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, Eddie attended a meeting at Camden to discuss next steps for LOTI’s City Tools project in advance of its launch in November.
City Tools is an initiative, run with the support of Bloomberg Associates, which aims to create a database of every software application used by each London borough to run their services and functions. Our hope is that insights from that data can help London boroughs to deliver more informed procurement practices and provide clearer information to current and future vendors.
Not so far from Eddie, Onyeka attended the Greater London Authority’s (GLA’s) Sharing Cities Tradeshow. This was an opportunity to hear more about the Sharing Cities’ projects that had been implemented in Lisbon, Milan and Greenwich, here in London. Each presentation explained how the team had designed, implemented and tested smart technology to. deliver financial, social and environmental benefits in each test city.
We heard how the installation of electric mobility charging stations were helping to reduce the Co2 emissions caused by the transport sector, of how an app which gamified walking and a greener lifestyle was helping to improve citizen engagement in Milan. Other talks focussed on eco-friendly retrofitting buildings, smart street infrastructure through the Humble Lamppost project, and the successes of energy management and data platforms.
We were invited to speak directly to the city leads afterwards to find out more about their learning and experience during the pilot phase, their business models and methods of financing to see whether it could be replicated in our member boroughs.
Friday
We organised our first-ever LOTI Social! This is the first in a series of informal in-person social networking events that we’ll be hosting for our members. We will be hosting breakfast get-togethers and afternoon lunch events in future too, so hopefully, we should meet the needs of our diverse membership.
Coming up this week
1) We’re currently at the GLA’s “New Methods” Conference and hope to share what we learn in our next weeknote
2) We’ll be continuing user research by interviewing Hackney and Brent, member boroughs with experience of managing digital apprentices, to inform the gaps in our user research
3) We’ll be hosting a call between the borough leads in Newham, Camden and Hackney who are leading on the Assistive Digital project.
