On the 12th of November the GLA hosted the latest Local Gov Digital London Peer Group meeting at City Hall. We had over 30 attendees from 20 plus local government organisations in London - all of whom enthusiastically took part in the various discussions.
The first half of the afternoon was made up of lightning-talk style presentations where 5 minute updates were given including the Local Digital Declaration, the Local Gov Digital Service Standard, the Local Government Digital Services Pipeline, the MHCLG Digital Fund and the GLA’s work on Smart London (including the Smarter London Together actions list that anyone can subscribe to for updates).
The rest of the day was given over to a lean coffee session. This is a format that allows attendees to decide on the day the topics they would like to discuss that would be most useful for them. As well as the topics above the group chose a number of other topics including “blockers to celebrating success” and “digital leadership”.
We held a short retrospective before the end in which the vast majority of people said they’d liked the format and would be keen to use it again.
The outputs of the various sessions on the day have been collected together into over 30 unprioritised potential topics, captured in this Trello board, for this community to potentially discuss in future.
Such meetups are a great way to improve collaboration between local government organisations. Between times we encourage people to join the Local Digital Slack via the sign-up form. There's nearly 1,500 people now active in that community - sharing issues and best practice as well as collaborating on a variety of projects.
Other great resources include the MHCLG Digital email newletter, their blog and list of events (such as the upcoming Digital Buying Community of Practice meeting in London on 16 January 2019). Another good resource is the Hackney Digital team blog. We'd like to promote other local government digital team blogs so please let us know of good ones.
The next meet up will be at City Hall on 14 Feb 2019 between 3pm and 5pm. If you’re interested in attending please email [email protected].