26 Feb 2024
by Swati Patel

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.

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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:
  1. The Local Digital Fund
  2. AI Ethics Tool for service providers
  3. Designing and building a HR chatbot
  4. Tackling local plan representations
  5. What can AI do for local government
  6. 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

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Heather Cover-Kus

Heather Cover-Kus

Head of Central Government Programme, techUK

Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.

Prior to joining techUK in April 2022, Heather worked in the Economic Policy and Small States Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat.  She led the organisation’s FinTech programme and worked to create an enabling environment for developing countries to take advantage of the socio-economic benefits of FinTech.

Before moving to the UK, Heather worked at the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas and the Central Bank of The Bahamas.

Heather holds a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP, a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) from LSE, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Macalester College.

Email:
[email protected]
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-cover-kus-ba636538

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Ellie Huckle

Ellie Huckle

Programme Manager, Central Government, techUK

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.

The programme represents the supplier community of technology products and services in Central Government – in summary working to make Government a more informed buyer, increasing supplier visibility in order to improve their chances of supplying to Government Departments, and fostering better engagement between the public sector and industry. To find out more about what we do, how we do this and how you can get involved – make sure to get in touch!

Prior to joining techUK, Ellie completed Sixth Form in June 2015 and went on to work in Waitrose, moved on swiftly to walking dogs and finally, got an office job working for a small local business in North London, where she lives with her family and their two Bengal cats Kai and Nova.

When she isn’t working Ellie likes to spend time with her family and friends, her cats, and enjoys volunteering for diabetes charities. She has a keen interest in writing, escaping with a good book and expanding her knowledge watching far too many quiz shows!

Email:
[email protected]
Phone:
020 7331 2015
Twitter:
@techUK,@techUK
Website:
www.techuk.org,www.techuk.org
LinkedIn:
https://bit.ly/3mtQ7Jx,https://bit.ly/3mtQ7Jx

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Annie Collings

Annie Collings

Programme Manager, Cyber Security and Central Government, techUK

Annie joined techUK as the Programme Manager for Cyber Security and Central Government in September 2023.

Prior to joining techUK, Annie worked as an Account Manager at PLMR Healthcomms, a specialist healthcare agency providing public affairs support to a wide range of medical technology clients. Annie also spent time as an Intern in an MPs constituency office and as an Intern at the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed. 

Annie graduated from Nottingham Trent University, where she was an active member of the lacrosse society. 

Email:
[email protected]
Twitter:
anniecollings24
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-collings-270150158/

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Ella Gago-Brookes

Ella Gago-Brookes

Team Assistant, Markets, techUK

Ella joined techUK in November 2023 as a Markets Team Assistant, supporting the Justice and Emergency Services, Central Government and Financial Services Programmes.  

Before joining the team, she was working at the Magistrates' Courts in legal administration and graduated from the University of Liverpool in 2022.  Ella attained an undergraduate degree in History and Politics, and a master's degree in International Relations and Security Studies, with a particular interest in studying asylum rights and gendered violence.  

In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, watching true crime documentaries, travelling, and making her best attempts to become a better cook.  

Email:
[email protected]

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Authors

Swati Patel

Swati Patel

Social Value Lead, TPXimpact