2020 09 25 Weeknotes
2.36 — the one with the Socitm share national conference…
A lot of this week was spent in the run up to and delivery of the Socitm Share National Conference, so a lot of juggling!!
The conference was four sessions over two days (Thursday and Friday) all based on my Socitm policy theme of the ethics of emerging technologies and data. The sessions were: Digital Ethics; Security; Emerging Technologies and Harnessing Data. We had an amazing range of keynote speakers, some fantastic supplier presentations and some fascinating panel debates.
All went really well and the conversations and sharing was just awesome!
Hosting event such as these are hard work, stressful at times and I think even harder in the virtual world. It can be really difficult to get a sense of the virtual room, to ensure that the pace is right or the mild panic when your keynote speaker is having problems joining the technology. But then I don’t like making life easy for myself either — I like to try and ensure we do things differently, to mix things up, so I ended up running a Slido interactive question at the start of each of the sessions — which then immediately meant we would be running behind a bit. Then I decided it would be a good idea to get the virtual room moving, so we did some ‘Deskercise’ — just a bit of stretching to get the energy levels up — now because I couldn’t see the majority of the audience it was probably just me doing it!!
But there are opportunities in running them remotely, we had speakers from Washington DC and Copenhagen, joining without jumping on a plane is clearly much easier and certainly much greener and was great to have them involved. It was really good to have my Assistant Chief Executive, Mandy Skinner talk about the work that Hounslow is doing as well, at the keynote on Friday afternoon. It really bought things back to real people!
The team at Socitm were great in getting everything sorted in the run up and on the days and also came up with my favourite line of the preparations of the conference (and a reminder of this covid world we are in)… We decided we were “very much looking forward to Friday at 330 — when I will be going straight to the fridge”…. Ah those heady days of celebrating our successes in the pub…
Some common themes coming out of the conference (in no particular order):
- Ensure we do everything with transparency and openness
- Think about the basics and get them right
- #FixThePlumbing
- Collaborative co-design with our communities
- The term Augmented Intelligence is better than Artificial Intelligence
- GDPR is a great tool to be part of the solution
- Trust with our communities is really important
- Ensuring that we work in genuine multidisciplinary teams is really important — but also very important to ensure those teams are diverse to ensure we don’t build in any unconscious bias
- Don’t blame the algorithm
- Think about the Why? And the Who?
- Culture of teams is important too.
In other news….
I actually went into Hounslow House on Monday for a meeting Mandy. It was great to actually see people and catch up with the service desk who have been running a service the whole time over the past 7 months. To actually have a face to face (socially distanced of course) meeting was great, odd but great!
We took our annual Information Governance report to Board this week — so much has been achieved by the team and starting to move into a more proactive and solutions based approach — rather than ‘just’ ensuring that the rules are being applied. It was really well received and there was a good conversation about the important of training — with a renewed focus on training in the council over the next few months! Result!
We have also been spending a lot of time thinking about the Future World of Work — a really interesting project, not least as we have started to abbreviate it to Future WOW! What does the world of work look like over the 6 months, year and beyond. We need to make sure that our colleages are supported at this time and that we are able to work effectively together, but then work has changes — we don’t need to sit on a train or in traffic for hours a day so what does it look like in the future. Going to be really interesting moving this one forwards — going to board next week for a discussion so will update next week.
Tune of the week: Lewis Capaldi — Someone You Loved (Madism Radio Mix)
