Below is the latest news from the LOTI community, based on the activities we worked on during the week commencing 4 July.

Meeting with our LOTI members

On Wednesday, we convened all LOTI members for our monthly workshop. We were pleased to welcome several new faces, including Paul Fisher, Transformation Programme Director at Havering, Nohaila Alavi, Assistant Director, Improvement and Change at Newham, and Wendy Carr, Director of IT & Digital Services at Lewisham.

Greenwich’s Kit Collingwood presented to the group on the development of her team’s new Customer Service Strategy, which aims to improve and create a more consistent experience for residents when contacting the council. The plans will also ensure there are staff available to directly support the borough’s efforts to tackle digital inclusion – a huge area of interest for all LOTI members. Kit’s strategy prompted plenty of discussion and questions from other members, who face similar challenges and are keen to share ideas with each other.

LOTI’s Sophie Nelson gave an update on our recent Digital Inclusion Conference, which brought together dozens of organisations from the public, private and third sectors who are working to tackle digital inclusion in the capital. Genta Hajri then shared an update on LOTI’s partnership with Good Things Foundation to develop a digital inclusion service for London.

Eddie shared the latest on LOTI’s work to develop a digital, data and innovation (DDI) capability model for London boroughs. Developed by LOTI Fellow, Omid Shiraji, and supported by Bloomberg Associates, the model highlights the core capabilities that boroughs may wish to include in their digital, data and innovation functions. It includes indicative data on the average number of staff boroughs currently dedicate to those functions and outlines the technologies that are typically involved. We discussed with the group how they wish to use the model and how we can augment the data to be as detailed and up-to-date as possible.

Lastly, Sam Nutt presented his work on designing practical measures boroughs can take to improve their approach to data ethics. As boroughs seek to make more ambitious use of data, they recognise the need to do so in a way that is transparent and worthy of Londoners’ trust. However, many of the existing frameworks available are quite theoretical, lacking the kind of practical advice boroughs need to put data ethics principles into action. Read our data ethics recommendations for more information on the practical steps LOTI proposes.

Hosting the final show and tell for the Supporting Dementia Care Project 

Last week we were pleased to be joined by the Helix Centre for the final show and tell of the Supporting Dementia Care Project. The team explained how they designed and piloted a solution to help people living with dementia engage digitally, and shared their learnings from this experience. If you missed the session you can catch up by watching the recording or viewing the slides. To find out more about the project, please contact matt@helixcentre.com or sophie.nelson@loti.london.

Coming up this week

This week, the team will be:

1. Meeting with our data practitioner’s network.
2. Planning and hosting an away day with our LOTI members.
3. Preparing for and hosting the LOTI Year 3 anniversary reception.
4. Reviewing and refining our plans and events for Year 4.

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