Vlognotes #9 Weeknotes S3 Eps 9 Data Standardisation, Inclusion, Forward Planning..

Meeting with Loic Boisdron and Colm Britton in the Digital Land Team (MHCLG) on their aspirations for publishing national lists of development plan documents (DPDs) and ultimately trying to understand the breadth of policies contained within them.

This is an admirable ambition and we really want to help them look at this as a standardised way of submitting data more regularly so we have a clear picture of planned development. This will have a profound impact improving practice as well as likely many other #Plantech and #Proptech initiatives.

Discussion in our City Management Team around the ‘What Next’ of remote/digital? Building on the remote and digital capabilities learned and implemented through Covid19. The utilisation of MS 0365 as a cloud working has been a real shift in behaviour but there is so much more we need to do. Capability should be determined by human interations and effective systems approaches with the technology being an enabler/faciltator to improve not a replacement for intrinsic human skills.

Really need to explore and network to utilise learning from elsewhere. I highlighted the LocalGov Digital and Slack API platforms where a lot of cool stuff is already well in train and is a really welcoming community of practice.

Local gov digital slack platform

Diversity and Inclusion Training provided by Sarah Simcoe was a real opportunity for reflection, some of my jottings;

• Disabilities/inclusion what does it mean?
• Consistency in working is exclusive, we need a more subjective and individual approach rather than always looking for broad brush consistency
• Covid has presented both opportunities and challenges to inclusion
• External — how and who engages; what parts of councils engage with different demographics, we could learn a lot from each others teams…
• How is external diversity within communities demographics reflected internally? if not representative then how can improve this to make better more well rounded decisions and interventions?
• Education and including those under represented to be involved in designing the process
• Iterative story telling should be mandated into designing inclusion strategies

Our Greater Cambridge Senior Management Team focus session with Stephen, Steven, Sharon and Heather was great and felt energised to lead into the weekend. We done the right amount of reflection and iteration of learning into high level scoping next years business planning work. We have been through a lot as a team in the last 3 years and there are overwhelming positives in the way we now approach and discuss challenges, opportunities and progress collectively, its one of the reasons I love working in my job.

Finishing this off whilst listening to CamelPhat… is getting the head moving… Week will definitely finish on a 30mins Joe Wicks HIIT to burn the weeks cobwebs out…

Have a super weekend all….. 🙌