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Videos, magical things and cupcakes - what type of event is this?

Kent & Medway Innovation Camp - Transformed by You on 20 March

This will be an all-day event (9am - 5pm) on the 4th March 2010 in partnership with IDeA. Venue: Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG.

LocalGovCamp will keep it *very* local so as to not get confused with UKGC10.

Themes will be relevant to anyone working with local government in the social media/digital engagement space. We are aiming to create spaces for discussion and engagement, the sharing of experiences and creation of new ideas. Conversations are encouraged. We will have lots of parallel sessions and break-out spaces. In the tradition of localgovcamps, you set the agenda in the beginning of the morning and afternoon sessions.

Apart from local authorities, MPs, councillors, ICT and social media specialists, we are inviting arts centres and other local heroes to work with us on involving their existing communities in learning how to engage online.

So even if you’re not able to make it for the whole day, come for however long you can!

You can register for your ticket on the Eventbrite page.


'Over 25 authorities are booked onto the LocalGovamp in March and I'm really looking forward to meeting with colleagues from around the country, many of whom I follow on Twitter or have emailed but never met. Social media and its implications for public sector work is a fast moving, ever changing area. It's really hard to keep up with all developments so these events are a great way to share stories and experiences. I hope to learn a lot from the others there and contribute what I can!' - Hollie Snelson, Internal Communication Manager for KCC.

- A special thank you to Anke Holst, whose blog can be found here: http://theanke.wordpress.com/

Picture: The LocalGovCamp logo: orange background with 'An unconference for local government' written underneath.

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LocalGovCamp is ON!

Have any of you read the latest government paper on public service reform? Despite being called Frontline First, it is aimed mainly at policy makers with the added bonus of new buzzword or should I say hashtag in town "smarter government". Further down the paper, it talks about creating a sharper government. Whether or not there is a ladder that government needs to climb to get from smart to sharp is up for debate, but what stuck out was this:

"We will drive innovation across government, with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills rolling out a package of support to all departments before Budget 2010. This package will include adapting a tool from the NHS National Innovation Centre to provide a cross-government showcase of the best innovations and a number of practical interventions such as innovation capability building exercises to support departments in tackling key challenges." (Frontline First)

Before asking our favourite “community translators” to tell us what this actually meant, we invited both the NHS and BIS to reflect on how the original concept works for health and how the new programme might help us work better with our colleagues in Whitehall and other town halls.
With the NHS Innovations South East taking us through how this can work with staff coming together with ideas to develop innovations, this really set the scene for how the Key Innovation Programme might look like.


The first slide really puts the challenge of collaboration in context. If people don’t have enough time to innovate in the first place, if they want you to guarantee that every idea will be successful and if they only want to innovate their way not yours, how can you bridge the gap between individuals coming up with great ideas and groups of people working together to develop innovations?

The two most important breakthroughs that this system could tackle are enabling people to work on an innovation across agencies on the same outcome (such as public health or worklessness) and take this all to the way through to sounding and testing the market. It even provides a way to engage SMEs to show concepts that could meet the need you’re trying to tackle. What’s also useful is that it will link up to other projects like Civil Pages and the Knowledge Hub.

From my experience, ideas are sparked for very different reasons. Often people won’t put forward an idea because they don’t feel it is fully formed or because they don’t have expertise to bring it to fruition. It would be unrealistic to expect that you need to be an expert at understanding how citizens live their lives, how the technology works and how to secure funding. That’s where the Key could come into its own as you can bring all these people together on one project.

Let’s say you want to promote positive behaviours amongst young people and there’s a fund coming up asking you to tackle this in an innovative way. You may have youth workers who can make sense of what the issues are on the ground, a government official who has a helicopter view of what other partners are doing and university departments who are experts around behaviour change. You also meet entrepreneurs who have an amazing idea on how people can share their concerns.

They will all have different views on defining what the issue really is and ideas to help tackle it. You could start conversations with them and also look for similar projects using a great search engine. Then, when you’ve got the bid together, you could explore what kind of expertise and tools you might need to procure. A few months down the line, you’ve completed the pilot and now it’s time to show the world what you’ve done, reflect and adapt.

In the real world, we know things don't necessarily work as smoothly as that, but this system could help narrow the gap between rhetoric and reality. If you're part of a KCC team and want to know more about how you could be involved then contact Noel Hatch. If you're not part of KCC but are interested in the KEY, then contact Damien Kennedy to find out more.

- Noel Hatch

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Smarter government or sharper government?

PublicExperience is a great way to put your own experiences of public services and suggestions for how to improve them in front of the UK Innovators Council. We are independent of government, but all the experiences we receive are sent to our partners in the Cabinet Office.

The Council has promised to pick up and run with the best ideas and implement changes based on your feedback. We ask a simple, open question: Wouldn't it be better if...?

You don't need to know who to talk to - just what you want to say about anything that relates to public services. It's easy and free to use – just go to PublicExperience and describe your experience of public services in the big box on the front page.

Emily Randall, Public Experience

If you want to find out more about what we're thinking about and looking at around how we can capture and work with people's ideas, see here. Contact us if you have an idea.

Thanks to PublicExperience for the photo of a panda explaining to a gorilla and a tiger how to share their experiences of public services.
Are you experienced?

A world café is a method of conducting a meeting in a very informal, relaxed format. Participants are invited to a café style setting (either an actual café or a room set up to resemble one). More relaxed and open conversations are able to take place in these types of settings. Sometimes participants are invited to draw their thoughts and conversations on the paper tablecloths to capture the free flow of ideas.

Meeting members move from table to table to discuss the issue in hand, whilst the host of each table remains behind. Conversations are cross-fertilised by this method and at the end the main ideas are summarised to all and follow up possibilities are discussed.

This follows on from the our research on how technologies disrupt the way we work and what we can do about it.

For more information please see People and Participation or The World Cafe.

Kirsty Russell

(Sketch of an example of a "world cafe" from World Cafe) Can coffee and notes on paper tablecloths liven up meetings?

Have a Happy Unconference

Innovators Council – Call for Ideas
Make Your Ideas Heard

What do we mean?
24hr Thinking