My lovely husband and I have spent the last couple of weeks sorting out the move down to Dorset and getting set up in our new place. It’s a process of working through which bits of our old life we want to bring with us and which we’re going leave with love behind in Sussex. …
I have used the fact I was on a panel on AI at the Stronger Things conference with some brilliant people to get my thinking organised around AI and community power. The session is called: Responsible robots – how to embed community power in your digital, data and AI strategy. The whole conference was fantastic …
Starting back at the DCN conference I’ve been talking about design a lot as I try and make the case that we need to design our new unitaries before we start to measure them. I’ve also been part of some really thoughtful work from the Policy lab on this and also some research carried out …
I’ve been really touched by the comments I’ve had on LinkedIn about as well as the notes and messages from my staff I’ve been sent the result of announcing that I’ll be leaving Adur and Worthing in July to take up the post of Chief Executive of Dorset Council in August. Thank you. As I …
This is an overview of the keynote speech that I gave at the CFGS conference. Clearly I am biased as the chair but I thought it was a brilliant conference, really carefully curated and hosted and with a real buzz about it as people came together to talk about the role of governance and scrutiny …
I’ve been reflecting on how the GDS local government sprint goals that Theo Blackwell is leading on and after a conversation with the team there I said I would suggest some practical prototyping which could help right now as we wrestle with Devo / LGR / Planning reform and of course the money…. I’ve just …
This is a quick ‘hot take’ as the kids say about the launch of the new digital centre for government yesterday. There were only a few local government people there so I thought it would be helpful to share. In parallel the state of digital government was published (spoiler alert: turns out the state is …
Another post with some dreams – very much from a personal perspective and as someone who has been thinking and researching in this space for a fair while now… While devolution is a huge and wide scale shift in how our democracy and state will operate its very very light in terms of democratic innovation …
Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and the balance between figure it …
In my other start of the year post I talked about some of my democratic and design dreams for the year – in this one I want to share my digital dreams. Stepping back from devolution question and into the reorganisation one, the opportunity for modernisation which comes with the creation dozens of new organisations …