Community-led commissioning

“It’s about putting real power in the hands of the people. It’s a model of services co-produced with the community, and it works.” Councillor Steve Reed, Lambeth Council

Councillor Steve Reed’s blog reflects on Lambeth’s journey towards a Co-operative Council; he believes the lessons so far for other councils is that closer involvement with the people who live in communities and who rely on public services can deliver better results, even at a time of severe financial constraints.

In a post to the excellent new ProgLoc Councillor Reed retells parents stories from estates across Lambeth, which led the council to explore giving people on estates their share of the total budget for diversionary youth activities with the professional support and advice they need to analyse their own local needs and bring in the services they need to fix the problem. Reed describes this and other Co-operative Council projects on his blog at: http://cllrstevereed.wordpress.com/

Download our own data now

Your data your way

MyDex provide a practical response to the research of ICO and Justice Minister showing that 80% of the population is now concerned about protecting their personal information online. Services like Mydex call for individual-centric services that start to enable real privacy as the only sustainable model as we see data volumes grow.

“We need information management tools that run on the side of the individual. Personal data has to be the user’s to manage, control and share. We need volunteered personal information agreements drafted with the user’s interests in mind. We need single-button subject access requests which let us “download our data now” to check and return if we wish. We need an emerging range of independent services drawing on our volunteered personal information to let us realise the value and power of our personal data.” MyDex

MyDex Whitepaper: The Case for Personal Information Empowerment: The rise of the personal data store

The place-based budget challenge – Source: Local Government Chronicle, 21 October 2010

Here is a recent article from Si Programme Director, Phil Swann on place based budgeting. This article was originally published at http://www.lgcplus.com

The Local Government Association has bravely gone out on a limb in putting the case for place-based budgeting at the heart of its submission to the spending review. In doing so it has made government support for councils taking on pan-public sector budgets a litmus test of the coalition’s commitment to localism.

Re-published by Shared Intelligence 15 November 2010

Company Incorporation – HMRC, Companies House & Businesslink.gov

A project I worked on with Think Public, to make it easier for people to incorporate a company and register it with the government. HMRC and partners wanted to make the process of incorporation more efficient to business and government by rationalising communications to customers and by co-ordinating with other government agencies to share information and explore data opportunities with third party service providers in the most useful and efficient way.

Project Brief

Design support for HMRC and Companies House from Design Council on Vimeo.

Natalie Jeremijenko: The art of the eco-mindshift

Sir Ken Robison RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

Lewisham Housing Options Centre – Public service by Design

This was one of the early prototypes for the Design Council’s Public Services by Design programme. Working with programme director Emily Thomas, we wanted to explore a capacity-building approach by taking senior management and frontline staff through a process of service design, based on a 5 phase framework. After a brilliant introduction to anthropology and a half day session on using a video camera and capturing the experience of the service by Think Public’s Ivo Gormely, frontline staff went into the centre with service users experiencing and documenting the service on video. When they later got together to watch the footage, they were able to draw out insights and group them into themes.
Next, Sean Miller of NoNon rapidly moved the group of management and frontline officers on towards the next stages of innovation, through a series of very practical and engaging, ideation and prototyping workshops. The group produced some great ideas for making the service better for customers see Design Council case study is available.

The project focused on the people within the service, those using it and those delivering it and the most compelling outcomes of the project were on the people, a more understandable service for customers, a rise in staff moral, reduced sickness levels and a core capacity for design in rethinking services.

Lewisham Housing Options Centre

Lindsey Craig, London Borough of Lewisham Policy and Strategy Officer “We have now established a working group with design at the heart. To make the design approach sustainable and not just a one-off we want to involve a rolling selection of staff who deliver the housing service in looking for new ideas to improve it. Design may seem an upfront cost, but if you engage with it and work with people who do it well, you develop lasting skills to take forward in to other projects.”

Jim Diers Part 1 of 2 Getting government and communities to work together

Jim Diers, City of Seattle, USA
As Director of Seattles Department of Neighborhoods, Jim Diers managed the development of 13 little city halls, 37 community-driven plans, 75 community gardens, and a Neighbourhood Matching Fund that has supported more than 3,500 community self-help projects. Jim now shares the lessons from his work through courses at the University of Washington; international consulting through the ABCD Institute; and his book, Neighbor Power. Through the use of numerous examples, his presentation discusses the key steps towards fostering effective community-government partnerships.

London Scores On The Doors

London Scores On The Doors

An ongoing project to release public sector data, foster innovation, make processes
transparent, drive-up standards and provide information directly to citizens so that they can make their own judgements through direct access to state resources. Encourages the wide-spread dissemination of local authority food business information through third party service providers and innovators. Developed and managed by the brilliant ICasework team for the Alliance of London Environmental Health Managers