The Friday before last we ran two workshops with staff and councillors from all of the councils represented on Dorsetforyou. We had a great turn out with over 150 people from across the councils, including people from Children’s Services, Adult’s Services Revenue and Benefits, Trading Standards and Highways.
For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a brief run through of what we got up to.
Neil Farmer, Chair of the Dorsetforyou board, kicked the workshop off by giving a brief overview of the project and its scope. If you’re not familiar with this, just take a look at our first blog for the low-down.
After this, Carrie Bishop, Director at FutureGov, talked about what it means to build technology with users, and the revolutionary impact this has.
One of the themes of Carrie’s talk was getting out and testing ideas early using prototypes. These prototypes can be anything from simple sketches of a website design that you show to users, through to role playing a new service. Casserole Club, one of FutureGov’s products, started life on just one street in Surrey with only one person, armed with a spreadsheet and mobile phone, testing out the idea of bringing neighbours together to share food. To learn more about this, and find out what 3D printed laser unicorn robots have to do with Local Gov tech, take a look at Carrie’s slides.
Then, Matt Skinner, who’s leading FutureGov’s work on Dorsetforyou, talked through the work we’ve done so far, detailed in our last blog post. Take a look at the slides to find out which pages on Dorsetforyou are most visited, and let us know if you guessed correctly in the comments.
Here’s a picture of attendees building towers out of spaghetti and marshmallows – this exercise was about demonstrating the benefit of getting started and testing things out, the groups that just started building were most successful.
Finally, we asked attendees to get into groups and come up with a vision statement and set of design principles for Dorsetforyou, taking inspiration from the Government Digital Service and companies like Amazon, Uber, Instgram and Facebook.
There were a whole load of suggestions – some focused purely on the website, others on digital more generally, and some on the council’s role in Dorset as a whole:
“A modern self-service gateway to local government information and services”
“Uncluttered, understandable, customer focused and realistic”
“Making life easier for residents, businesses and visitors”
“Inspiring people to self-service, share information and interact with their local councils”
“To deliver better services to all residents at lower cost”
We’re taking all these suggestions and feeding them into our work as we get into the prototyping phase of the project.
Finally, before attendees made there way out and into the warm Friday afternoon sunshine we asked them what, if they were forced to, they’d choose: a site that helped people to complete transactions quickly and easily, or one which promoted Dorset and everything it has to offer. As the picture shows, transactions came out on top.
Where would have stuck your sticker? Let us know in the comments below.
