2020 03 06 — Weeknotes
2.9 — a week of evening meetings, OK 2….
Another hectic but important week in progressing the digital strategy.
Monday evening was the first board meeting for Members for the Digital Strategy. We had two main objectives of the meeting. To present the governance of tech across the Council and the digital strategy. It is a cross party group that has oversight of the digital strategy and programme of work. It was a great meeting, lots of questions, queries, challenge and support for the approach. A real good discussion around all areas from getting the hardware and processes right to transformation of services and supporting our residents with the skills they need. One great idea that came up was to ensure that councillors become digital champions themselves to help lead and support.
Tuesday evening was cabinet briefing where the Portfolio holder introduced the strategy and report in preparation for Cabinet on 17 March. It was towards the end of a rather long but very interesting meeting but it was well received with some good questions and challenges. Next stop 17 March…
The journey home was an interesting one, just after I got on the train at Hounslow someone came through the empty carriage and pressed the emergency button. Just what I needed at 10 o’clock! He was complaining of chest pains, we found the guard who then arranged for help at Waterloo. But this poor guard kept having to help this chap and run back and forth to open doors at the platforms… Should have offered to help (pressing the buttons to open the door — not sure I’d have been any use otherwise).
It has been a real LOTI week this week as Clive attended the Advisory Panel on Wednesday as well that helps sets the overall direction of the work.
Thursday was a morning at home but then a journey into London to meet a company who does digital service design, amongst other things. Was a really interesting conversation, gave me a lot to think about how we move some of these projects and transformation areas forward as well as building the team for the future.
All this week LOTI And the GLA has been hosting an Internet of Things Discovery week. Teams of volunteers from boroughs, industry, academia and other third sector organisations have been exploring some the key challenges that were discussed at the conference on Monday.
I was only able to go on the Friday but Andy attended the initial session on Monday and Gabriel from the team attended one of the sessions in the week. From the live streaming and the updates on Twitter it looked a really good week but it really came alive on Friday. Three ideas were chosen from the discussion on Monday and explored during the week, these were presented on Friday. Broadly these were: Common Standards for IoT, a sharing portal for IoT information and a communications and engagement for explaining IoT. We were asked to vote on one to progress, I couldn’t, all three were really important to progress and would be really good for London. A lot of people gave up their time this week for the events and it appeared to work really well, combining 6 months of research into a week. Pretty impressive and definitely an approach we should consider in the future.
Tune of the week: Another random one… Ayla - Ayla (DJ Taucher Mix) https://youtu.be/I_deLl8ZgtY
