Drive Change: New approaches to digital in local government
A little bit about Stockport Council’s digital story…..
A large part of our strategy in Stockport is based on a long term view that to solve the problems of local government the 350 or so councils need to collaborate. One of the key aims of the conference is to bring together local authorities to start having lots of conversations and learning about best practice in digital.
We have realised that in order to cope with increasing demand and decreasing budgets, we need to digitise. After exploring the many options of how we might do this, and what we want to achieve, we’ve started down a route that is a little bit different. In-house, we’re trying to create a digital platform that we can share with other councils and partners. Working with others, we’re aiming to create a platform for collaboration over the next few years based on open standards, open source, and generally being pretty open! we’re trying to learn lessons from high profile GDS work over the past few years, and from the private sector, and use it to create something flexible and sustainable that can cope with the changing needs and uncertain landscape for local public services. We’re obviously trying to cope with huge cuts and changing demand, but we’re also trying to get ourselves off the well-trodden path of relying on external suppliers and are developing our in-house teams to ensure that they have robust skills for the future.
The event is for: Local authorities, public sector partners and digital community groups.
Key benefits of attending:
- Opportunity for collaboration
- Learning about best practice
- Learning from our neighbours
- Using agile for pace and productivity
- Open source / open data
- Networking with like-minded councils
Speakers include:
– Tom Loosemore – Co-Op/GDS
– Mani Hothi from Nesta
– Dominic Campbell / Carrie Bishop from FutureGov
– Liz St Louis current Head of customer service and development, Sunderland Council
– Alison McKenzie-Folan current Deputy chief exec – director customer transformation, Wigan MBC (Digital Council of the Year)
– Janet Hughes from GDS Verify
– Adam Micklethwaite and Sharon Wagg from Tinder Foundation (Assisted Digital)
– Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
– IoT initiative lead from Thoughtworks
It’s a free event with lunch included. Register for your place now at: