What might we talk about at One Team Gov Global?

by Morgan Frodsham, Stefan Janusz and the One Team Gov team

On 16 July, we will host the One Team Gov Global unconference. The main point of an unconference is that there is no set agenda: attendees make their own programme on the day. But for those coming a long way to join us, we want to both give people a flavour of conversations that might happen on the day — and bring people together to join up similar ideas. This post shares some of our initial ideas and invites you to add to them.

The agenda at an unconference is created by people standing up and ‘pitching’ their own ideas; the greater the diversity, the better the overall experience. Our unconference has a clear theme: share ideas and experience that will improve public services and reform the way we work. But bringing together people from so many countries (27 and counting) means we’ll have a huge variety of experience on how you do that — and we want you to tell us yours in advance so we can join up people who might want to pitch together on the day or share things in advance.

To go first, here are some of the major themes that we’ve picked up on in the year since we founded the One Team Government movement, which we expect might come up on the day:

1. Better service design: How do we give greater integrity to what we do by getting closer to the citizen experience? What practical things can we do to improve things, eg: asking senior civil servants to commit to attending a specific number of user research sessions in their department over the next year?
2. Diversity and inclusion: How do we make sure all voices are heard at all levels of government? How do we make the public sector less hierarchical and more egalitarian and avoid groupthink?
3. New power: Is there a seismic shift happening in the way power works in public service? Are we seeing an emergence of new power as opposed to old power? If so, how do we role model this seismic shift on the ground? How do we commit to change in real time?
4. The future of our sector: What will be our purpose when the nature of work fundamentally changes through AI and other technological, economic and political developments — will old jobs displaced and new ones we can’t yet conceive? Will it be to do social good? How do we prepare our sector for that?
5. Better procurement: What would a better and more open procurement process for global civil society look like? How do we design for diverse and equal participation in the whole procurement ecosystem? Is it possible design out corruption and inefficiency through a genuinely participatory procurement model? Check out some early thinking here.
6. Opening up work: Can we meaningfully, as the whole of government, share what projects we’re working on with each other and publicly so that we can improve public service across the board? How do we reward and encourage innovation? How can we synthesise disruptive voices? How can we use disruption to make governance/ public service/ government better?

We want One Team Gov Global to be global by design. This means we want ideas from around the world to be shared. We’d love your input on this and other topics — here’s how:

• Let us know what you think of these topics either by commenting here, contacting us @OneTeamGov on Twitter or emailing at contact@oneteamgov.uk
• We’d love to know your experience of the public sector in your region, even if you’re not a public servant. What are you working on? What are you planning? Is anything blocking you from moving forward? What’s keeping you awake at night? Is there something you need help on? Please let us know on the above details.
• If you’ve got a bigger idea, please write a blogpost and let us know so we can share your writing with the rest of the community

Perhaps you have theories on solving a global problem, or a proposal for making positive change? Maybe you’ve cracked a tricky issue in an innovative way. Is that something you can share with the One Team Gov community?

Please do get in touch and share your stories — One Team Gov Global will be your event!

If you’d like to know more about how unconferences work, our colleague Helen Bevan has written a great post about how this grassroots method unleashes the collective brilliance of people in public service.

But the best thing to do would be to come along to One Team Gov Global on 16 July and find out for yourself. If you’d like to attend but have yet to get your ticket, you can apply here.