LOTI: Weeknote 69


Updating our members


We started our week with a meeting with all our members. The slides are now available to view here.

All member workshop 17 Nov 2020

At the meeting, we shared a progress update on our work with procurement leads:

  1. Finalising the Data Access and API Tender Requirements, which provides suggested wording to be included in all technology tenders. This will support boroughs to clearly and explicitly set expectations with suppliers about their data access and API requirements.
  2. Publishing the alpha version of our Innovation in Procurement toolkit, developed in collaboration with PUBLIC.
  3. Onboarding of boroughs to the Thirty3 platform, developed in collaboration with Nitrous. Our experience so far can be found in Jay’s blog.

We also gave an update on the Assistive Technology project (more details on this can be found below), our collaboration with Bloomberg Associates to develop a Digital, Data and Innovation reference model for boroughs, as well as our Covid recovery projects.

AT project update at LOTI All Member meeting

Progress made on Assistive Technology


As some of you may remember from this blog, Genta Hajri (LOTI’s Programme Manager) shared how LOTI would be helping member boroughs’ Covid recovery efforts to support isolated individuals to live more independently through our Assistive Technology project.

One of the needs identified in our workshops (the full summary is available here) was to be able to record, prior to a new Assistive Technology (AT) trial, a baseline of participants’ wellbeing to ensure any improvements can be captured. To that end, we have developed a wellbeing questionnaire. We’ll be using this as a means to consistently assess the wellbeing of residents taking part in LOTI pilots conducted by Hackney and Greenwich.

The questions seek to capture:

  1. a self-assessment, by the resident, of their own wellbeing
  2. the resident’s context and circumstances, with a view to identifying gaps that particular assistive technologies could support with.
LOTI Assistive Technology Wellbeing Questionnaire

This document is still very much in draft, so please do take a look and let us know any thoughts you might have for its improvement in the comments. This will be considered by LOTI’s Assistive Technology leads before the pilots start in the new year.

We’ve also been working on a template user agreement with Eden Munro, Project Officer for Hackney. This template has been designed for use in AT trials to set out the basis of an agreement between residents and local authorities in a way that’s accessible and in language that’s easy to understand. We’ll be presenting this to be considered by the Information Governance group for London (IGfL) in December.

Draft Template UA for AT Trials (1)

Given the relationship between local authorities and the vulnerable residents who are likely to participate in AT trials, it is likely that time will need to be spent discussing this agreement with them beforehand. We will leave the practicalities of how this is done to the discretion of officers using this template. We appreciate that boroughs may need to adapt it to ensure that it is an accurate representation of what they and their residents would expect.

If you do access the template and would like to use it, please do share that you’re doing so with Genta Hajri as we’d be interested in understanding more about how it’s used in future.

This Week


This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:

  1. Hosting a demo of the Innovation in Procurement toolkit, in collaboration with PUBLIC.
  2. Holding our latest meet-ups for our networks of Data Managers and Data Scientists. We have invited colleagues from NHS Digital to the Data Managers network meet-up to discuss the common challenges with covid-19 datasets.
  3. Joining the Community Engagement Playbook (a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government C-19 Challenge funded project) kick-off meeting.

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Eddie Copeland
23 November 2020 ·
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