Improving how London boroughs engage with residents

Our work on digital approaches to public engagement first began in response to boroughs’ urgent need to conduct their elected member meetings online as a result of the Covid crisis. It’s now expanded into a much broader look at how digital democracy methods can enable boroughs to engage their communities in more meaningful ways during the Covid recovery period.

Last week, we joined colleagues from LOTI boroughs Kingston, Sutton and Waltham Forest for the kick-off meeting of the highly anticipated MHCLG-funded project to develop a Community Engagement Playbook.

In the meeting, we explored what the challenges were, whose world we’d like to be different as a result of the product we develop, and what outcomes we wanted to achieve. The full details of the kick-off meeting can be found here.

Next up, the delivery partner (Snook) will be connected with:

1. People who can help to identify audiences for the playbook and what they think would be useful to include in it
2. People who can provide the team with different use cases for the playbook
3. People who can provide the team with content for the playbook
4. People who can give useful insight into how different audiences’ constraints vary (technical, budget, skills etc.)

It’s sure to be a busy first week for the team, so if you feel that you fit into any of the following categories above, be sure to get in touch with Onyeka at LOTI, who would be happy to put you in touch with the Snook team.

Shared experiment to innovate in Housing procurement

Last week, Genta (LOTI’s Programme Manager) shared her aspirations for LOTI’s first shared experiment in our innovation in procurement project, which is starting out by exploring the world of housing services systems. Our work here is based on the advice in the new toolkit we developed in collaboration with procurement leads in London boroughs and the PUBLIC team, which we shared in a Show & Tell on Monday.

Later in the week, we convened a group of housing specialists and procurement leads from London boroughs to kick-off the next phase. The PUBLIC team shared insights about what technology solutions are available on the market, before discussing what approach boroughs might wish to take together. Boroughs were encouraged to delve into the practicality of this experiment, taking into account the feasibility and desirability of the suggested procurement approaches. The slides from the workshop are available here (please note: this was a members-only event and some content discussed during the workshop has been redacted).

This week, we’ll be hosting the next two workshops in the series, so stay tuned for what comes out of these in our next weeknote.

Using data to manage covid-19 outbreaks in London

As you may have read in Jay’s blog (LOTI’s Data Projects Manager), London borough data teams have been supporting public health and frontline colleagues to understand the impact of COVID-19 in their area and assist the national contact tracing system through local contact tracing efforts. One of the sources of the data they use is from NHS Digital, who publish the Shielding Patients List that helps them to understand which residents might need additional support.

Since the publication of this blog, we’ve met with colleagues from NHS Digital and Public Health England. Colleagues from both organisations have been willing to work constructively with our network of data professionals in London boroughs to improve these processes. Last week, we invited colleagues from NHS Digital to attend our Data Managers network meet-up to gather their feedback on the instructions for creating automated transfers, managing Shielded Patient Lists, and the same for Local Authorities.

There was a lot of healthy discussion about what could be done and where there’s room for collaboration. You can watch the full discussion here.

This Week

This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:

1. Holding the last in the series of virtual learning sessions with Microsoft for Digital Apprentices. Full details can be found here.
2. Joining the MHCLG C-19 Challenge Showcase #2 to share details about our ‘Data Exchange with Voluntary and Community Services organisations‘ project.
3. Holding the final workshops in the series of experiments to test LOTI’s Innovation in Procurement toolkit on housing services.

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