Skip to main content

Pipeline: The First Fifty

Back in 2013 I wrote about about kick starting collaboration and in the spirit of LocalGov Digital's ethos of "Think. Do. Share" we've been thinking, then doing something about it.

A couple of weeks ago LocalGovDigital Makers launched Pipeline, to help enable collaboration between council digital teams. At present it's very much an alpha, a platform to investigate the functionality needed to allow councils to work together more closely together and a pilot to test out Makers Project Teams.

We publicised the launch with a few tweets, an article on the LocalGov Digital website and Digital  by Default News ran a piece on it you could say it was fairly low key.

As I write this, we've had people from 50 different councils sign up.

I'm under no illusion. This isn't 50 councils all ready to dive head-first into the sharing and collaboration of their digital work, I'm sure some will have joined through personal interest or curiosity.

I don't want to downplay the initial enthusiasm though. In my mind, "good" looked like people from 20 to 25 councils signing up, the usual suspects plus a few more. So far we've got 80 people across 50 councils and more private companies (who are also very welcome to join) and there's interest from the wider public sector too.

What's most heartening is that the interest isn't down to a full on, well planned media campaign. It's also not down to a great product. Pipeline is good, but it's far from finished. If neither of these are the main attraction, it's more than likely down to a genuine interest in collaboration.

Pipeline is progressing and the next release contains the first functional elements to help join up councils. The real test will be to keep those who've signed up engaged it its development, to get them adding projects.

So here's to the first fifty. The councils with at least one person forward thinking enough to be curious about collaboration:

The First Fifty

Aberdeenshire Council
Adur District Council
Barnsley Borough Council
Birmingham City Council
Bristol City Council
Calderdale Council
Cornwall Council
Devon County Council
East Sussex County Council
Eden District Council
Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council
Guildford Borough Council
Halton Borough Council
Hampshire County Council
Herefordshire Council
Hertfordshire County Council
Hinckley & Bosworth District Council
Huntingdonshire District Council
Kent County Council
Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council
Leicestershire County Council
Liverpool City Council
London Borough of Barnet
London Borough of Camden
London Borough of Hillingdon
London Borough of Lewisham
London Borough of Redbridge
London Borough of Southwark
London Borough of Wandsworth
Monmouthshire Council
Nottinghamshire County Council
North Lincolnshire Council
North Yorkshire County Council
Northamptonshire County Council
Northumberland County Council
Norwich City Council
Plymouth City Council
Reading Borough Council
Reigate and Banstead Borough Council
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council
Shropshire Council
South Gloucestershire District Council
St Helens Borough Council
Suffolk County Council
Surrey County Council
Surrey Heath Borough Council
Torbay Council
West Berkshire Council
Worthing District Council
And the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit