PDF Social Innovation Lab for Kent

The issue   

The stimulus for creating SILK, the Social Innovation Lab for Kent came from a review of Kent County Council’s approach to policy making in 2007. This highlighted persistent difficulties in [...]

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The LGA has just released a report on how councils are using tech to save millions. It features a number of examples on how geo-spatial data has been packaged up in apps to help local people access services more conveniently [...]

PDF Improving Economic Prosperity During the Recession Aug 2010

There are patterns of common responses by local authorities and their partners to the impact of the recession – task forces, early payment  of invoices from small businesses, financial inclusion services, redundancy support, etc), highlighted by the Audit Commission report (When it comes to [...]

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Most of the examples in my LocalGov2.0 example blog have been about the institutional use of social media or open data in local government. But there are at least as many examples of councillors who are using social [...]

PDF Warrington Borough Council transport case study July 2010

Key Learning Points for Others  

Warrington Council and its partners have focused on the quality and usability of their bus service. They have been able to offer a viable alternative to the car for local journeys as a result of their focus on the quality of service, [...]

via rbkc.gov.uk

Kensington and Chelsea have joined the growing number of councils that are exposing their expenditure data. Although there are only 20ish so far, that number is getting bigger all the time, so much so that I’ve made the decision that [...]

PDF Reducing CO2 Emissions Aug 2010 

Key Learning Points for Others  

These six partnerships have acted upon a collective knowledge that climate change is already impacting upon their locality and that the future impacts and costs require urgent action now. Many areas have completed Local Climate Impact Profiles and are commencing on the comprehensive risk assessments [...]

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It seems like we’re miles away from an election right now, but the next local polling in England might just be the social media election we didn’t quite get in May.

Stephanie Noble describes a local election in [...]

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Dan Slee has blogged about how Walsall Council has used Flickr and its local community to spruce up its web pages. He has step by step information about what they did and what kind of things you need to consider as well [...]

PDF Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea’s Virtual School

Abstract

In the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea the difference in educational attainment of Looked After Children and other children is consistently smaller than in similar areas and the gap between the two cohorts has closed significantly over recent years. This can be largely attributed [...]

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As far as I can tell, Aberdeen City Council is the first Scottish council to release open data. They’ve released councillors’ allowances and leisure facilities as machine readable data. (CSV) A good place to start. The first is [...]

The LG Group has recently written to Heads of Finance, Policy and Performance and Communications to create a list of leads on the transparency and open data agenda, and in particular the publishing of expenditure data.

If we missed you, please get in touch.

The full text of the letter is below and it can also [...]

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I’ve just seen in the Social Media Community of Practice that folks from four separate local authorities are collaborating on guidance on social media for the public sector in a wiki.

They’re only just starting off, but there’s [...]

The film Thank Goodness it’s Monday is aimed at encouraging managers in local government to get the best out of their staff. It provides a business case for engaging with employees, and shows a range of excellent practice from Wychavon District Council, Birmingham City Council, London Borough of Hillingdon, Aberdeenshire Council, Chorley Council and Westminster [...]

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Derbyshire is using both a wordpress blog and a Facebook page to support a reader development programme on literature in your local area.

I love seeing mentions of the places I lived and loved in books, so a [...]

PDF – Improving Services for Older People

The issue 

Older people are living longer and form an increasing proportion of the overall population.  Today a typical man and woman aged 65 can expect to live another 18 and 21 years respectively.  Over the next twenty years the population aged 65 and over is projected [...]

The Transparency Programme is focused first on helping local authorities to release expenditure data and other required sets by January.  Getting the data out there, open, re-usable and done as easily as possible – addressing redaction, licensing and the impacts of releasing expenditure data.

It’s also focused on making this data useful to local authorities [...]

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There’s a new case study on the LG Improvement and Development website covering use of social media in Kirklees for tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyles which focuses on their use of Facebook:

Students in an area of West Yorkshire are [...]

PDF – Inspiring & Supporting Partnerships North East RIEPs

The issue:

The North East Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) has set itself an ambitious target – for the North East to become known as the English region that is most effective at partnership working.  With the recent round of local government reorganisation, there has been [...]

The LGA Group, Socitm, CIPFA and LeGSB are working together through a Transparency Programme to help local government meet the requirements of openly publishing expenditure data and to help local public services achieve the democratic, economic and improvement benefits of open data.

Throughout Autumn of 2010 we will do [...]

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San Francisco has a showcase of applications using open data. And I’ve featured London’s before here, too. San Francisco has got lots of interesting and useful apps, including one I’ve been wanting for ages but which there just [...]