UKGovCamp 2021: My First Public Sector Unconference!
I recently got the chance to go to the 3 days #UKGovCamp 2021 unconference (Jan 21-Jan 23), and I was really intrigued to go as I had never been to an unconference before (check out the Wikipedia definition here) — essentially, it's a conference where people can have two-way conversations with their peers, has no sponsored presentations or hard selling, with tons of sessions around important topics concerning the public sector, be it about processes, new legislation, technology, security, and lots more.
Normally, the conference is an in-person event but with the pandemic, this was the first time the organisers made it a virtual event and I must say I was impressed with how well the virtual conference experience was organised and came away from it with a lot of learnings which I will expand upon in a bit.
During the event, I got to choose from over 75 sessions, spread over the three-day event, which covered a variety of topical discussions (see extract below for Day 1 Schedule list).
The sessions themselves were via Zoom calls, but to alleviate Zoom Fatigue, some sessions introduced some interesting collaboration tools such as Miro, a collaboration platform with built-in whiteboard and virtualised post it notes, and Remo, which enabled attendees to hang out in virtual breakout areas to enable us to virtually chat to other conference attendees with ease, which mixed things up a little.
On reflection, during the conference, I felt I was among a diverse set of people that work at different levels of government, the NHS, and Local Councils, looking to better the work they do by questioning what they do, and asking their peers “is there a better way?”
It is this enablement to have everyone in a session participate to better understand and work to resolve challenges that embodies the idea of an unconference.
Being a technologist, I picked out some of the key learnings and thoughts that still linger in my head from some of the sessions I attended:
- There seems to be a consensus that Local councils build out new IT systems overbuilding and sharing them with other councils due to regulatory restrictions — could IT companies do more to help local councils deliver more effective cross-boundary shared services?
- A Government AI Roadmap to help the UK government’s strategic direction of Artificial Intelligence has just been published — what can IT companies do to help deliver on their strategy?
- How will the National Archive record our 2020/2021 digital highs and lows and everything else in between as future generations look back — could Blockchain help here?
- Some feel the planning to manage this pandemic was a disaster in itself — how can technology help us to plan better to manage the next disaster?
Each of the above thoughts will probably gnaw at my brain for some time to come as the answers to them won't be easy, but I will make it my mission to start a discussion on one of them before UKGovCamp 2022!
As a final note, I would like to congratulate the UKGovCamp organisers on putting on such a great event :)
About the Author
Ken is a System Integration Consultant for Version 1, currently working in Version 1’s UK Digital, Data & Cloud practice.
