3.34 — weeknotes — out and about a lot this week

As always, it’s been another hectic week and to make matters slightly worse this week I’ve managed to develop the cold that’s been going around. So the end of the week was a bit of a struggle…

On Monday of this week we had the judges come and visit us at Hounslow House as part of the LGC (Local Government Chronicle) awards for Council of the Year. It was good to spend a day with colleagues in Hounslow house and quite intense when the judges came round.

The 6th floor of Hounslow house was set up in 7 zones that took the judges on a journey of discovery of all the things the council has been doing over the last year. My zone highlighted all the work that the council has been doing on digital inclusion and we were joined by the local CVS. It was good to hear from Jane on how the council has changed over the last couple of years and all the amazing stories from her, and her team, where we have donated kit or trained up individuals or groups to be more digitally competent. Awe inspiring.

Someone had this great idea to introduce a bit of virtual reality into the judging, so a quick turnaround to get something in place for the day. Not elegant but we managed to get some VR (ish) videos on some of the regeneration sites across the borough. I think they were quite impressed — we will see on the 4 November.

On Wednesday of this week we had an away day with our colleagues in Lampton Community Services. We have met them online many times over the last 12 months or so but not face-to-face so it was great to have a workshop with them and try and plan for the future. There are a huge amounts of opportunities and similarities with what we are trying to achieve over the two organisations. Our challenge is going to be getting everything prioritised and worked through.

We had on Thursday our October digital strategy board where we went through a huge amount of items. A flavour below:

• Updates on the various projects and programmes that are running at the moment including the priority projects as part of one Hounslow
• An update on the savings programme
• The changes we want to make to the phasing of the device refresh programme as we continue to have supply chain issues
• The work we are doing to create a roadmap for data
• Further work on funding for connectivity in the borough
• And finally an update on the Digital Festival — coming in November

What a week! Finished the week helping on the One Hounslow Cabinet reports and trying to get the paperwork sorted to push forwards a number of projects.

Tune of the week: Had no idea what I was going to use until this came on! Random! The Tamperer feat. Maya — Feel It — Christmas TOTP 1998