Thoughts on a Digital Innovation Strategy for London

1. Co-creating the Capital: towards a Digital
Innovation Strategy for London
January 2009
Contact:
Dominic Campbell
Founder, FutureGov
dominic@futuregovconsultancy.com
www.futuregovconsultancy.com

2. Introduction
This paper sets out some early thinking around what a Digital Innovation
Strategy for London might look like.
The aim of the Strategy would be to assess London public sector’s current
strengths and weaknesses in terms of digital engagement, cross-
organisational collaboration and co-creation of services with Londoners
themselves. Through the Strategy, this would be developed into a roadmap
for London, outlining how it could best invest in digital media to meet its
aspirations to both transform itself as an organisation, the relationships
between organisations in London (in the public, private and third sectors) and
fundamentally rework the relationship between London government and its
citizens.
The case for change
Recent years have seen the rapid growth of what has become known as
‘web 2.0’ or ‘participatory web’. The emergence of tools such as blogs, wikis
and podcasts, as well as social networking and content sharing sites such as
Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, has enabled mass participation,
communication and collaboration as never before.
This shift has started to not only have a revolutionary impact on popular
culture but also it is starting to fundamentally shift expectations placed on
institutions, organisations and the government itself. Authors such as Clay
Shirky and Charles Leadbeater, and film makers such as Ivo Gormley have
begun to chart the impact of this mass movement, one where not only do
people expect the state to act in a fundamentally different way but also self-
organise outside of the state to co-create services once delivered by the
government.
There has been an equally significant shift in forms of democratic
engagement and government policy. Embodied by the Obama factor, ‘open
government’ has become a political imperative and with it the values of
transparency, participation and collaboration. In the UK, values such as
choice, independence, personalisation and user focus now crosscut all
policy areas and have become accepted norms cross-party political divides.
Change is happening in and around government while government at all
levels has yet to truly embrace the agenda in the UK and truly reap the
benefits it could bring.
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3. An outline Digital Innovation Strategy for London government
We identify five emerging strategic themes to a Digital Innovation Strategy for
London. We also provide examples of the kinds of initiatives that might fall
under each theme:
1. Connected councils (and wider public sector organisations)
• Build on and open out the work of the London Collaborative
• A Facebook for public servants in London supported with offline
networking opportunities such as the BarCamp model
• Providing opportunities to celebrate public service and public
servants, such as the I am Public Service initiative in the US
• Systems to provide opportunities for officers and members to propose
ideas for sectoral improvement projects such as the forthcoming
Innovation Exchange platform
• Systems to capture and share ‘soft intelligence’, for instance
safeguarding 2.0 project (forthcoming from FutureGov)
• “Listening tools” for councils, drawing on buzz monitoring
technologies developed for brand watching and marketing purposes in
the private sector
• Investigate the validity for a young and future leaders focus
2. Digital democracy
• Open and deliberative policy making opportunities in line with the
change.gov approach, drawing on similar tools as used for the show
us a better way competition and supported through offline events
such as Who Wants to be?
• Getting councillors online including micro-blogging (for instance
building “TweetyHall” to work alongside Tweetminster locally) and
blogging network for all London councillors, supporting the Be a
Councillor campaign
• Real life stories of being a councillor, much like I am Public Service, as
a means for drawing people into the democratic process
• Online peer to peer support for new and not so new councillors
• Develop tools capable of presenting back policy decisions and
investment in interesting ways, along the lines of the Policy Map tool
for instance
• Theyworkforyou local for London
• E-petitions for London
3. Cyber citizens/virtual voice
• Hyperlocal agenda
• Citizen involvement and engagement
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4. • Citizen reporting, building on existing initiatives such as Kings Cross
Environment (which has now received funding from Channel 4’s 4IP
fund)
• Invest in existing emerging services such as HopHive or tools like City
Soup for real time reporting and crowd sourced community
• Digital mentoring to upskill Londoners to take better advantage of the
opportunities afforded by the internet
• Simple ways of recording opinions of Londoners about London, for
instance “Big Brother diary room” style video booths such as
VideoBoo system
4. Co-produced services
• Explore development and expansion of new tools/models of service
redesign and improvement in line with co-production techniques used
by companies such as thinkpublic and participle
• Challenge and improve services, through examples such as
AccessCity or Visiting Prisons, rating services and showing where
investment should be prioritised
• Client group social network platforms that can be replicated across
niche groups and enable peer to peer support and learning
• Development of tools for London to better provide access to public
information and engage residents in customer service, in line with
tools such as getsatsfaction.com, planningalerts.com and
fixmystreet.com
• Tools to provide access to performance information in a user friendly
and accessible manner to enable citizens to hold public services to
account
5. Explore new models of public service delivery
• Social enterprise as new form of government delivery
• Co-created, co-produced and co-owned services outside of
government
• Draw on the Social Innovation Camp model of service prototyping and
rapid development for low cost and at low initial risk
• Review potential to invest in or support emerging new institutions and
forms of peer to peer or self-organisation such as school of everything
or slivers of time for instance as existing trial blazers to exemplify and
encourage others without reinventing existing initiatives
• Explore where opportunities exist for people to come together to ask
to take on public services fairly rapidly and at low cost and low risk to
the public sector, for instance managing smaller local parks
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5. Initiatives to support the implementation of a Digital Innovation Strategy
There are a three areas that if implemented would support the delivery of a
Digital Innovation Strategy for London, in short enabling innovation by
rethinking funding streams, supporting public sector staff to take advantage
of this agenda and freeing up public data:
1. Innovation fund for London
There is now a relatively well proven model of for funding innovation that
London has the chance to tap into and grow to meet its own aims.
Seed funding initiatives such as NESTA’s Big Green Challenge as well as
the Social Innovation Camp (another NESTA supported initiative) have
shown how much can be done to mobilise the passion and involvement
of individuals and their ideas for relatively little financial outlay.
Using the same model, and most sensibly run through and/or with UnLtd
or NESTA’s challenge teams given the existing infrastructure already in
place, London could consider establishing a small fund itself – known as
‘Social Capital’ for instance. The board would potentially be led by some
of London’s senior public sector officials and politicians, but also social
and private entrepreneurs.
The board would establish clear ground rules, establishing the fund as
pump priming innovative ideas capable of redefining public service
delivery in the city, not to prop up existing (failing) service delivery
models.
The key to its success would be to develop a funding process that was
fast and flexible and able to react swiftly to invest in good ideas to
address some of London’s key challenges through a relatively easy to
access application process. It may also consider investing in some of the
infrastructural needs for social start ups, such as using the extensive
public sector estate in London to create a low cost or even free space
within which these companies/ideas could be incubated to give them a
head start and in turn create an innovation hub.
2. Ensure the systems, processes and capacity are in place to support public
servants and organisations in London into new ways of working
Collectively review and rework existing IT, HR and other policies and
cultural issues within the London public sector that currently hamper the
adoption of new media and more collaborative ways of working.
This may range from providing more explicit support, guidance and
training that encourages and rewards the use of (on and offline) social
media and approaches on the one hand, to understanding the blockers to
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6. adoption in terms of technology in London’s public sector undertaking a
risk assessment of use of social media within organisations.
Even those organisations leading this agenda have yet to embed a culture
of rapidly turning listening into learning and changing to better meet the
needs of their citizens. In part this might be due to the fact that new
models of delivery are required in certain cases (see point 5 above), but
developing a model for organisational change in a web 2.0 world is the
key to embedding practice in public institutions.
3. Open up data
Relating to national initiatives, such as the Power of Information Review
and the Show Us a Better Way competition, and in line with projects in
forward thinking cities such as Washington DC and its Apps for
Democracy competition, London has an opportunity to lead the way and
make its datasets publicly available.
On the one hand, this would involve working with all public bodies, from
local boroughs to TfL and the LSC, to prove open access to currently
closed data. By providing open access to (anonymised data), it will allow
the leading digital thinkers in London to reuse, represent, mashup or
combine the information London government holds to make it useful to a
wider audience in ways that do not happen currently. The tools that have
arisen out of the Show Us a Better Way competition and other tools such
as the FutureGov project AccessCity are prime examples of what is
possible when data is made available publicly at no cost to government.
Taking it one step further, a more adventurous approach to data that
would be the first of its kind might be to consider allowing individuals'
data to be released back to them, and allow individuals to share data with
the public sector as they wish. This would enable a far more personalised
level of service from public institutions with individuals as well as
providing a far more sensitive picture of true need in the city.
In both cases, London is well placed to draw on the expertise of global
experts in the city to the sector free their own data and support
individuals to manage their own files.
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7. Next steps
The main tasks of a fuller scoping exercise would include:
1. Map current practice and set scope
• Review current adoption of social media and digital engagement
practice across London government
• Desktop research and interviews with key stakeholders at a
London and borough level as well as wider cross-sectoral
conversations
• Highlight and cost quick wins.
2. Implement quick wins
• Identify some quick wins to provide a proof of concept and
demonstrate some key benefits and outcomes from innovative
approaches to digital engagement.
• This would require a small budget to be set aside to enable the
team to quickly move from highlighting and agreeing quick wins to
implementation.
3. Develop and implement a Digital Innovation Strategy for London
• Work up a full Digital Innovation Strategy for London including:
o Strategy document
o a fully costed and prioritised list of actions
o project plan
• Programme manage technical delivery partners to deliver on
strategy
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8. About FutureGov
Government focused strategic communications, engagement and
organisational change consultancy with specialist expertise in the use of
social media and online tools. Our expertise lies in driving change in the
areas of:
• Community engagement
o Democratic engagement
o Conversational communications
o Open government and policy development
• Collaboration
o Enterprise 2.0
o Change management
o Joined up working within and across organisations
• Customer service
o Coproduction of services
o Coproduction of services
o Feedback and peer support
o Driving brand loyalty and engagement
FutureGov also has in-depth knowledge and expertise in public service
innovation, closely involved in the running of sister organisations Enabled by
Design and AccessCity during 2008.
Enabled by Design supports anyone looking to make adjustments to their
lives through the use of assistive equipment, be it as a result of disability,
injury or personal identified need. We aim to make independent living more
accessible through the use of clever modern design, bringing users of
equipment together with product designers to challenge the traditional
hospitalised take on assistive equipment to create more design orientated
and personalised products.
AccessCity allows Londoners to record their frustrations, hints and tips for
fellow Londoners and visitors to London creating the real view of London
based on people’s own experiences. AccessCity challenges the traditional
top down expert approach to accessibility and provides a platform for users
of services (transport, shops, restaurants and others) to highlight issues and
propose solutions in their own terms.
Both social enterprises are working to redefine relationships between the
citizen and the state, creating a new form of organisation that draws on the
wisdom, energy and creativity of their communities to co-create public
services that better meet their needs. We believe that this is a model that can
provide lessons for public sector organisations moving forward.
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