UKGovCamp 2016

Date posted
28 January 2016
Reading time
11 Minutes
Rob Lazzurs

UKGovCamp 2016

This year was my first time attending UKGovCamp and let me tell you it was fantastic. If you have the chance next year go. I knew even before attending it was likely to be good as the tickets were almost impossible to get, I do wonder if some people had automated this. This was hosted at the National Audit Office. On arriving it looks like a typical government building in London all stone and very serious looking. However once inside I was greeted by the friendly team running the show and welcomed into I can only describe as a beauiful and modern office. Somewhere that would be a real pleasure to work. From the very beginning it was clear there was a core group of people that had been here and done this before, this event has kept people interested over many years and had a really friendly feel. For those that don't know UKGovCamp is a BarCamp style event or unconference as it is sometimes called. This means there are no designated speakers and who ever turns up get to decide what they talk about on the day. What this creates is an event that is much less like attending a university lecture and much more like a chat with your friends in the pub. Collabration not dictation, freedom not command. This might all sound a little free thinking or hippy for the very serious UK Government with civil servants in gray suits but as someone that works closely with the government on a regular basis I can assure you those days are long gone. Now down to what happened on the day. You know you are at a great event when there are more things you want to attend than can and that was definitely the case here. There were discussions on everything, from blockchains to purchasing. The first session I attended was around Open Source in government. This is a topic very close to my heart (and head) as I started out my career hacking on open source projects and that helped me learn things I would have never learned elsewhere. The fact is this is one area where there are an endless number of success stories. Be that from HMRC, GDS or any of the other government departments now open source. What we pay for gets pushed out to the public where at all possible. It was agreed by everyone that more could be done around sharing this great work and bringing along the usage as well as the production of open source in gov but this is on a good track. [caption id="attachment_14330" align=" width="599"] width= Picture by @liorsmith[/caption] The second session was one I had suggested, I was very happy my suggestion was accepted. What I had proposed was "How can we spread the awesome from the UK Government internationally" as I had slightly cheekly suggested that what is being done here in the UK is the very best in the world. This is what good looks like. In true BarCamp style the discussion morphed to discuss both how we could best communicate with other governments outside of the UK and how we could do better to spread the central government work to both the devolved administrations and local government. A few of the people there agreed to take some actions away from this to help the devolved administrations have their own GovCamps, maybe an international version, start a mailing list pushing more of the awesome out that the UK Government does and getting more people involved with GovGeeks. It just takes a few good people with a great idea to change the world, one step at a time of course. Finally I attended a session on Agile Procurement. This is a very interesting problem and one that has not yet been cracked. In government we are doing great things in small teams that very quickly over a week or two deliver something that is useful to citizens. This is what agile means. However while the work we do is very agile, how government buys in the agile teams is not. There is a lot of upfront planning and sign off of big budgets. Because of the way budgeting in government works if they want to spend money with a supplier to provide a new service then what value this is going to provide has to be decided before any work is started and a budget created for this work. The problem with this is you don't always know at the start of a project how you are going to create the service people need, it is not that simple but we are forced into guessing what we might need to do and how long it is going to take before we start. I don't know about you but I have no idea how I am going to do my work two years from now, I can't even say what type of device I will be using in two years time nevermind what I am going to use that device to write. Technology moves faster than budget cycles. While no magic solution was provided there were some good ideas suggested around signing off the budget every two weeks (what we call a sprint) and around suppliers like us sharing the risk of these projects with you the UK public but there is much work to be done in this area and this is not a trivial problem to solve. These events have been happening for many years, they happen at the weekend and none of us are paid for this work. We are all doing it because we want to make this country a better place to live and the best way to do this is to make government more awesome. While other governments are already in awe of what we do here we can do better and I have no doubt we will, given the great people I had the pleasure to meet at UKGovCamp. If you want to make the country you live in more awesome why not come and have a chat with us at Kainos where we do this on a daily basis and we always need more people to help us.

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Rob Lazzurs