One Team Gov Global — we’re going “around the world”
This post is about the One Team Government Global event taking place in January 2022. If you want to find out more, carry on reading…
For those who don’t know us, One Team Gov is a public sector reform movement which aims to improve public services and change the way we work through practical action. We’re a community of passionate, empathetic people; anyone in any sector who cares about public sector reform can join us.
For some time, now I have been looking at the success of the cross-government Slack, including writing an article about it for Apolitical.co, and wondering why something similar isn’t happening one level up — in the international space. There are a number of great organisations that host conversations between government leaders and public servants on specific topics, but there isn’t a global directory that government employees can add themselves to or a chat-based forum to host ongoing discussions. I brought the idea up again at GovCamp in January: several people said it sounded like a good idea, but it didn’t gain much traction afterwards.
Since then, I’ve had the great fortune of running into a few people from governments around the world who are enthusiastic about trying this out. The principles of One Team Gov lend themselves to what we want to achieve and, following a number of One Team Gov Global events over the last few years, the community is known in a lot of different governments around the world.
We’ve been thinking about how to build the One Team Gov community on Slack between events and how to support people when they join. We want to make it easy for people to join the community and then have a welcoming committee to help them as they come through to help them figure out who they can connect to. And we want to take our sixth principle, work across borders, literally.
That’s why we’re holding the next One Team Gov Global in January 2022.
Like other events we’ve done, One Team Gov Global will be open and democratic. Rather than a programme of meetings or lectures, One Team Gov Global will be an unconference — a series of sessions defined by participants on the day. The event will “follow the sun”, meaning the sessions will happen around the world across a 24 hour period (accommodating all time zones). It will be a remote event, but we’re looking into whether we should help people to meet up locally, and connect further.
This event builds on, and is inspired by, the work already done to build a public sector reform movement. Like other events we’ve done, One Team Gov Global will be open and democratic. The aim will be to share experiences and good practice, inspiration and innovation, with participants being the voice for change. We hope it will inspire, teach, and give practical help about reform to everyone who attends. It is a brilliant opportunity to learn from others, share what you’ve done, and make connections on a global platform.
We want to foster meaningful, international, online collaborations and conversations that will lead to better policy and solutions. We hope it will quickly and easily connect people with others around the world who are doing similar or interesting work.
Reform should be for everyone, everywhere. We hope you agree. We’re really excited about the event already, and we hope to see many of you there.
Interested? Next steps…
- If you want to attend, you can register your interest here: https://forms.gle/c5va1HFgBCHnKNer9
- If you want to get involved, you can join us on Slack (channel: #one-team-gov-around-the-world) or get in touch with us at @OneTeamGov or contact@oneteamgov.uk.
- Keep up with the news @OneTeamGov on Twitter and our Medium publication.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
The One Team Gov Team
This post originally appeared on the David Durant’s Medium page. It has been edited to reflect the progress that the organising team have made in hosting the next One Team Gov Global.
