Firstly, was with a design lead in one of Birmingham city council’s business transformation programmes. I stated the (unconfirmed) statistic that most 16 to 25 year olds in Birmingham access the internet via their mobiles and suggested we utilise social media as a first response channel.

“There is a lack of political will and too much bureaucracy to over come”, they said.
“However about a national framework for local government, driven by a central [skunk works] team?” I replied.
“I refer you to the answer I gave you some moments ago”, they joked. [Paraphrased response].

I then offered up the hacker communities, who would love to get involved. I got the same response, but countered with the idea of a local government hackathon, the open source output of which could be fed into the skunk works. Blow me! I got a nod of the head and a favourable response

Second chat was with 2 consultants working in the same transformation programmes. Floated the skunk works idea and was told it wouldn’t work. Period. I dug a little deeper and was referred to the NHS electronic records project (my Mum was involved in this, so I knew about it). The meat of the project failure boiled down to poor communication.

Therefore, to make this work I surmise we’ll need: -

1) Political will
2) Bureaucracy busters
3) buy-in
4) Dam good communications

Any takers? I’m up for it

Trying to do too much outside of the “norms” i.e. developing local solutions, is probably too much of a shift in mind-set for some authorities this early in the movement.

One general comment that I would like to make is that *most* of the conversation we are having here is focussed directly on the technology and making “stuff”. Should we not be looking less at the technology initially and more at what outcomes local authorities should be delivering, what value they should be adding and how they (service and technology areas) can be more effective AND THEN look at how the innovative use of technology can enable or facilitate the changes and services required?

I still think *we* are absolutely the right people to drive this innovation, but lets move away from the keyboard and focus for a moment on the front-line & how authorities are operating internally for a while get drawing on those whiteboards and map out what we actually need to deliver…

Day 1 -Analogue-Skunkworks
Day 2 – Visualisations & Shared Understanding
Day 3 – Shift mind-sets
Day 4 – Hybrid local authorities with open innovation
Day 5 – Mesh of local authority technology skunkworks
Day 6 – LocalGovCamp
Day 7 – Have a rest…

Just a thought?

On 1&2 How would a network-based approach look like? Working through strong relationships and existing networks seems to be important, especially with intermediaries that are embedded in the community. Some will be more formalised, such as community action networks or chambers of commerce and others more self organised i.e. local tuttles, meetups, hack groups as Adrian suggests etc.

Especially relevant may be localised groups who create spaces that make it possible for people to use their time, skills and networks – what Nat Wei calls “philanthrophic capacity” – for the community. Often, we start at the end always trying to scale everything up, but perhaps to preserve that looseness and agility, you could look at existing projects where councils and communities are working together and introduce skunkwork approaches (like the London Datastore).

These groups will help you involve residents. Work with them to analyse people’s social networks in terms of who they share their knowledge with, learn their skills from and who influences them the most. Maybe that there is a strong cluster of people with tech skills but maybe that its less the specific skills they’ve got but more the places they cluster around which can provide a skunkworks space, or issues they care about like repairing a village hall that you could use skunkworks approaches on. This will help define the mission of the skunkworks.

Really like Emer’s suggestion about “developers in residence” I think we can broaden this to other creatives and disrupters, what David Barrie calls the “militant optimists”.

On 3. Agree you need specific projects to test on. Crowdsourcing ideas online and at face to face innovation camps could be a way to build those relationships and projects which have open innovation embedded into them from the start. Using project-based spaces.

On 4, you do need ownership by the council but also from the beneficiaries of the project (whether it’s local people, staff or groups), so it’s always best to involve them from the start and not do things to them. Often well-intentioned people want to put their skills to good use and develop the solution quickly, while building relationships between the different actors can take time. Start with the people and groups you’ve built strong relationships with, you’ve been bouncing around ideas and explore how skunkworks could help turn those ideas into prototypes.

On 5. the elephant in the room! In terms of leveraging investment for this, it makes sense to test some innovative forms of investment, like participatory budgeting, community or social impact bonds, or work with alternative local currencies (like Brixton Pound), local exchange trading schemes (LETS), or crowdfunding (like Kickstarter). In the meantime, I imagine a combination of support for skunkworkers to get together (like a venue, PCs, wifi perhaps, etc) could kick it off? Think brokering the connections to people (like venture capitalists) and organisations who can provide finance will be very important, as well developing the capacity for local finance (credit unions, local banks, etc), but’s that a wider debate!

From my experience involved in groups developing micro-initiatives in the community (in my spare time!), it’s very small levels of support we need – often in kind – like regular access to a venue to invite people to develop these initiatives with us, food and drink to keep people to keep people’s energy levels up and access to be able to shape community projects developed by local institutions.

A much more developed type of support of skunkworks can be found here http://slidesha.re/dFq6l8 Maybe we could have a Code for America in the UK?

A good place to start would be a regular meetup in a pub or in a library with wifi. Just get people meeting each other face to face, share ideas and skills, that sort of thing.

Come the summer I want to see developers out in their town centres sitting with a connected laptop and a big sign saying “talk to me about local websites”.

But putting learning online so it _can_ be shared doesn’t seem sufficient. I want to tease out how to _make_ it shared. LGID? LGIU? Local Government Leadership? CoP? All of the above?