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Local digital: Creating social value in collaboration with DLUHC
Tackling Economic Inequality - Create new businesses, jobs and skills, and increase supply chain resilience and capacity.
Challenge
TPXimpact is working closely with The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to develop and improve the usability, accessibility and security of local services. They are doing this by working with councils to curate a series of interventions to improve digital maturity and improve council services.
As part of our social value strategy for DLUHC, TPXimpact committed to designing and delivering a number of local digital community meetups. This was in line with Theme 2 Tackling Economic Inequality, MAC 2.3 Education and Training, as part of the tender submission requirements.
Reimagining public services to be fit for 21st century challenges is crucial to economic prosperity and social cohesion. The goal of the community meetups is to bring together ambitious changemakers to share their experience and learnings of digital projects that are helping us move towards more user-friendly, flexible and impactful local public services.
Solution
TPXimpact wanted to address the challenges local authorities and the wider public face by creating a community of organisations working together with a shared vision: To build a cross industry, cross sector community of practice to share learnings from some of the most promising examples in systems change that help make public services user-friendly, flexible and impactful.
The concept is simple, anyone working on open local public service innovation (public, private, voluntary or third sector) can join us for an evening of lightning talks. Peers openly share the ideas and emerging products and services that could be reused by any local authority under open source, or creative commons, principles.
This, in turn, helps drive quicker digitalisation of local government, and the full realisation of benefits that citizens experience when their needs are well met, by well designed, data-driven services.
We record and share the talks online so even if you can't be with us in person, you can still learn from the exceptional work happening across the country.
Whatever your interests, the meetups are designed to be an open space for all. Everyone is welcome to attend, share and learn from others (regardless of their project or career stage). This cross-service, cross-organisation and cross-discipline knowledge sharing is essential for creating a better public service design culture, and ultimately, better outcomes for local service users.
Impact
In April 2023, TPXimpact piloted a meetup in its London offices. This solidified its resolve to run regular community meetups across the UK and to bring together ambitious changemakers to share radically new, standards-based models and tools for local public services.
Through these sector meetups TPXimpact has:
- Welcomed over 160 guests to the meetups to date. The first meetup can watch this here on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIsxHlYw_R
- Recorded a total of five lightning talks:
- three from DLUHC projects (Local Digital Declaration, Future Councils and the Back Office Planning System)
- one on a Redbridge-led project to diagnose the causes of vendor lock-in in social housing management
- one on the Open Source community directory, Outpost o a retrofit service mapping a way out of vendor lock-in in housing
- had speakers covering a range of topics, including:
- The Local Digital Fund
- AI Ethics Tool for service providers
- Designing and building a HR chatbot
- Tackling local plan representations
- What can AI do for local government
- The New Models for Social Care pilots commissioned by the London Office of Technology and Innovation.
The local digital community meetups have allowed local authority staff to showcase work in progress, get feedback on projects in real time, and help those in the community to connect over shared interests and challenges. Benefitting projects have included:
- transforming social prescribing through scaling the Open Referral UK data standard
- designing data interventions to address the barriers to improved housing management systems
- digital planning
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Ellie Huckle
Ellie joined techUK in March 2018 as a Programme Assistant to the Public Sector team and now works as a Programme Manager for the Central Government Programme.
Annie Collings
Annie joined techUK as the Programme Manager for Cyber Security and Central Government in September 2023.
Ella Gago-Brookes
Ella joined techUK in November 2023 as a Markets Team Assistant, supporting the Justice and Emergency Services, Central Government and Financial Services Programmes.