2020 11 06 — Weeknotes
2.42 — we are go with the digital festival Hounslow!
As we go into lockdown 2.0 there is a certain amount of deju vu here, but we are trying to push on through things, with the launch of the Digital Festival Hounslow really helping to bring colleagues together at this time.
Digital Festival Hounslow 2020
Niall and I launched the month long series of events on Monday morning and we had about 20 events during the first week. These ranged from a daily mindfullness session and a Friday evening pub quiz through to sessions on wellbeing using Teams and social prescribing. All virtual and all free. Some aimed internally and some opened up to the communities of Hounslow.
One of the highlights for me was the launch of the Hounslow Innovation Network (HIN) — where we got people from across the council together to start to help solve some of our issues. It was launched by Mandy, the Assistant Chief Exec and we were joined by colleagues from across the council who really started to throw themselves into it already! Our first challenge is to get the whole council through the Information Governance training. The team pulled this great animation together to build the excitement during the launch — Hounslow Innovation Network
We have three more weeks of sessions. Continuing the development of HIN, more sports day events, more sessions aimed at wellbeing and more technical sessions to develop digital skills across the council. Already great fun and looking forward to the next few weeks.
We also have launched our Socitm survey for customer satisfaction — I did this last year as I wanted to get a flavour, new into the role, of how the organisation saw Digital & IT, we had nearly 1,000 responses and colleagues really told us what they thought. We had about 300 comments as well which was great to drive the improvement plan, this year I was to increase the numbers and get over 1000 people to respond. It will be really interesting to see how much (or indeed whether!) we have improved!
Digital Inclusion Group — had another great meeting this week, aiming to really get our communities as digitally connected as possible, this is in part about skills but also about devices and connections. A range of work taking place across all these elements — again really exciting to move this forwards…
As part of the internal reshaping of Digital and IT we have started to interview internal candidates this week. This has been a new experience for me, interviewing via Teams but has been good. Apart from the moment when it was my turn to ask a question and for some reason was not able to get myself off mute — so Clive had to step in whilst I was waving my arms around trying to say “I can’t unmute — can you ask the question!” — at the very least I think it put the interviewee at ease!
Leisure services transferred into the council from the 1 November, so the start of this week was busy getting colleagues set up with kit and logon details. The lockdown will sort of actually help us buy some time with getting the various systems and infrastructure in place, which will then enable us to open some of leisure centres…
Saturday was spent mainly watching the information from the USA come through. Some of these counts are so close and can’t really believe that it is 4 days later and they are still counting — really makes you appreciate the UK systems…
Tune of the week: Beck — Loser https://youtu.be/YgSPaXgAdzE
