LocalGovCamp 2015

On Friday and Saturday SilverStripe will be joining many of the industry leaders at LocalGovCamp in Leeds, UK to inspire and collaborate with those involved in local and national government. We’ve been inspired to pitch a couple of workshops at the unconference day on Saturday.

The Dream Government Platform - The Discovery Phase

What does the dream government platform look like? To find out what the perfect platform for local government looks like, perhaps we need to start by looking at what we like and dislike about our current ways of working, commissioning projects, and collaborating across boundaries and borders? How do we go about identifying what we want from a platform and what mistakes we want to avoid?

SilverStripe is an Agile company through-and-through, so as part of a discovery and learning exercise we’ve taken some inspiration from Scrum retrospectives to come up with a group activity to help identify the parts of current processes that make us mad, sad, and glad. Using trusty Post-its and Sharpies, we’ll collaborate in small teams to discuss current systems. We’ll then talk as a group about our thoughts and how our ideal platform would help us solve these problems.

We’ll finish by showing you how Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand and SilverStripe have already solved many of these common problems by creating the Common Web Platform and that these can be solved with a collaborative and open platform approach for government.

Open source Lego car

LEGO! Who wants to come build Lego cars and learn about open source and community collaboration at the same time? In this activity we aim to give you a hands on example of the benefits of collaborating on software development and the lessons that can be learnt by local government. 

Key concepts that we will cover in our Lego game:

• Knowledge sharing
• Code sharing
• Collaborative thinking
• Shared resources
• Community participation

In this activity you will be split into teams and then have 3 rounds to build, collaborate, and improve your car. At the end of the 3 rounds we will test your car’s ability to transport Lego citizens and crown the winner. It should become clear that designing collaboratively leads to better outcomes and efficiencies.