On Saturday 25th January 2014 we visited UKGovcamp; the annual 'unconference' for people interested in how the public sector does digital stuff. The event was held at City Hall, Southbank, London.
Find out more at: http://www.ukgovcamp.com/
Transcript
Jeremy Gould, Founder UKGovcamp
I spent 2006 and 2007 meeting lots of really interesting people around government and around the outskirts of government, and working for large organisations who were interested in working with government, and I kept thinking, wouldn't it be great to get them all in the same room together in one day. And that's really what Govcamp was about.
Lizzie Bell, Ofsted
UKGovcamp is an amazing opportunity to meet like-minded people and also to meet people outside the kind of people that you'd normally work with or meet in professional life.
Rhammel Afflick, Govcamp attendee
My favourite thing about Govcamp has to be the people really because everyone's really welcoming and everyone's really respectful of their views.
Mark O'Neill, Government Digital Service
It provides a very supportive environment for conversations and topics that are sometimes very challenging because we're talking about collectively how do we deliver the kind of services that people should get not the services that we think they should receive.
Rhammel Afflick
The idea is that you turn up and there is no agenda essentially, the people who are part of the audience, part of the event, get the opportunity to pitch an idea.
Lloyd Davis, UKGovcamp compere
That's the thing that's really always so important is that we haven't decided what it is they're going to talk about; they talk about what they want.
Livia Oldland, Cambridge County Council
It's my first time in Govcamp today, and I've really liked the unconference style, meeting lots of new people, meeting people from government working in technology.
Mark O'Neill
I think an awful lot of the changes we've seen in recent years in terms of focus on the user, digital transformation, I think those would have been an awful lot harder to drive forward without Govcamp.
2 comments
Comment by simonfj posted on
Thanks for the head's up.
Good to see you guys get out. Just a couple of things, while I'm going through a few of the discussions (which don't display well in Firefox. The right scroll bars get chopped). http://www.ukgovcamp.com/discussions/
Just as a way of helping us unwashed get orientated. The Categories 'drop down' is good. But it would be nice if you could make "the teams" a bit more obvious. Just want to make sure that readers get used to how you've split the GDS into logical, task orientated groups/teams. We don't need home designers addressing the structural engineers (all the time).
I see you've posted this one as 'GDS team', which is a pity in some ways (not half as sociable), but I guess it probably is the best way to categorize posts into team entries. It gets a bit confusing as the other GDS teams are task focused, while GDS is an umbrella org, like the GCN https://gcn.civilservice.gov.uk/. Maybe you post as GDC. It might with help the merger of skills. e.g. responding to a comment like this. (Bernard! You've lost your plausible deniability!)
If the 'open government' teams follow the what the 'open research' guys have been doing, which they must, you'll be trying to align people in the institutional silos with their professional peers. 'Groups/task forces' in the research space means 'teams' in GDS lingo. In research this is happening inter-country, which GDS puts that in the O(pen) G(overnment) P(artnership) box. Eventually we'll all have to share (some sections of) the same inter-network infrastructure. I'm sure Liam will agree.
I see my suggestion - of combining all the personal blogs here https://blog.gov.uk/ for a 'leaders' blog - has taken on a life of its own. http://digitalleaders.co.uk/ Nice surprise. Perhaps you'll want to rss their blog to your (ever expanding) list, just so, as your directory for the blogs develops, we keep it (the archive) as complete as possible (and in context:). Even the Vogons should be tidy.
Onwards! BTW, which way IS that?
Comment by Martijn posted on
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