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Posts from the ‘local gov’ Category

Jul 22

‘Are you having a laugh?’ – Disability and Television

‘Are you having a laugh?’ was a programme produced for BBC2 that took a lighthearted look at how disability has been portrayed on television over the past 40 years.

Kate talks about the inspiration for the programme, as well as some of the stereotypes she has experienced as a wheelchair user.

Watch ‘Are You Having a Laugh?’ on BBC iPlayer today at bit.ly/bnBVAg !

Enabled By Design, London 17 Jun 2010.

Film produced by Martin Cahill. Supported by Transforming Management http://tm.mbs.ac.uk.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

Jul 22

When T-shaped met T-shaped

Julia Cassim on creative partnerships that foster design innovation and …

  • what do we mean by inclusive design?
  • the ageing population and the YoYo concept.
  • uber YoYos – Madonna and Mick Jagger.
  • repositioning disability and removing the metaphorical creative handcuffs.
  • how do you put on a band-aid if you don’t have any arms?
  • introducing products that are both inclusive and sustainable.

Enabled By Design, London 17 Jun 2010.

Film produced by Martin Cahill. Supported by Transforming Management http://tm.mbs.ac.uk.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

Jul 15

With Not For

Charles Leadbeater on how to create services and solutions with people, not just for them.

Enabled By Design, London 17 Jun 2010.

Film produced by Martin Cahill. Supported by Transforming Management http://tm.mbs.ac.uk.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

Jul 14

What creates an Anti-Social Society?

No Camping

No Dogs

No Ball Games

Say No To Strangers

No Litter please

“Is it any surprise that we live in an Anti-Social society?”

These were the words offered by Wayne Hemingway, founder of Red and Dead, at a sterling Design Event held in London recently.

“In a green, open area, why are we banning all those things that should be taking place? Apart from litter, we should be promoting camping and ball games – there aren’t any windows in this photograph too smash! … And why not talk to strangers – this is an ideal social setting to meet new people and chat about the day”.

To see this talk in its entirety please visit Enabled By Design blog site or click on the video below.

Film produced by Martin Cahill.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

Nov 25

Jayne

“I have to keep celebrating that I’m alive. I shouldn’t be here now. I’m on borrowed time”. These were the words spoken by Jayne before she sat down and told her story about how Individualised Budgets has changed her life, the life of her husband Mark and her wider family including her Mum.

Jayne’s life as a high energy career nurse was thrown into chaos at the age of 30 when she was diagnosed with cancer. She describes how treatment offered structure to her weeks following the original announcement and how she found a sense of purpose in simply trying to stay alive. “By finding structure and purpose something positive will merge” Jayne says. This model of chaos, structure, meaning and emergence has seen Jayne through eight years of fighting cancer and all the ups and downs that entails.

Jayne explains how time became her greatest commodity because no one could say how long she had left to live. Following her first round of treatment Jayne took a part-time job which allowed for flexibility and days away; days spent with Mark on an canal barge – “We like canal barging – it slows life down”. However, one afternoon Jayne was plunged back into chaos as she fractured her spine pushing the boat through a lock. The cancer had spread to her bones. At this point the nature of the problem had changed. It was was no longer an illness, but a disability. This was going to take away her independence and this was the one thing that scared her the most.

It was at this point that Jayne was offered Direct Payments, but this proved to be rigid and outside of her desire to regain independence – “I was trying not to be a disabled person. I didn’t want many of the installations that were being offered. I did need help though, especially with my food shopping, but the times were fixed and no matter what I had to be well on that prescribed day, but I wasn’t”. Outside of this chaos Jayne found meaning attending a local college to study art, but was soon hit with a real problem. She was reliant on other students to lift the wheelchair from her car – “you can’t describe how helpless it makes you feel”.

This is when Jayne was introduced to Individualised Budgets (IB) and she was able to purchase a floating chair and trailer for her car. “All of a sudden my life was transformed. I could go shopping on my own. I could get to and from college and also take part in local field trips. I felt independent again”. The IB payments also allowed Jayne to compartmentalise the six hours of support she was offered through Direct Payments. It was broken into different instances allowing Jayne to take the burden of cleaning the house from her busy Mum and instead spend quality time with her at the local swimming pool. “The IB budget has really allowed me to understand where I want to spend my time and what I want to spend it doing. In the end, this is not about having a service, it’s about having a life”.

Jayne does however state that there has been periods where she has been able to reduce the budget – “We are very conscious that this is not our money. I keep returning to the IB panel and asking if it’s okay to procure a particular service. There have even been instances where I have even been able to give money back”. Jayne now has support on a daily basis – a position that Jayne gave great consideration to – “This is the person I am going to choose to share the last parts of my life and it was important that I was able to make that choice”.

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The full report is now available. Please click on the link below to read the report or left-click and download.

Unpacking Service Transformation – Oldham In Control

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Aug 17

What price email? Local government to save £0.7 billion by 2010

Google Apps for Education - Free email and apps for schools.

2007 - Designing the Council of the Future.

What were we saying and what is happening today – 2009?

What were we saying?

Looking towards 2020 there are many questions that remain unanswered:

  • Who will own and manage local authority ICT?
  • How much will technology cost?
  • Who will be the predominant supplier of software? Microsoft, Apple, Google, Open Source, or even you.
  • Will your organisation still exist as we currently know it? Bricks and mortar may no longer be required?

… Every authority will likely maintain their own email servers. Privacy and security suggested that it was better to operate your own system than to trust this to a third-party supplier. In the early days, email required expertise in order to install and maintain the exchanges…. Email is business critical, but it is equally a commodity item… Yahoo and Google Mail maintain millions of global users each day. They no longer restrict their email storage space, and in fact incrementally increase this every second of every day. With this in mind we would be right to ask why one organisation must maintain its own email system and the costs associated with it. Can Google or Yahoo Mail do this more effectively than our own organisation?

So, maybe we all move to something like Google mail? They maintain our alias – email@localauthority.co.uk, and the authority maintains a light contractual agreement. If this is unrealistic, perhaps we can think about procuring Google or Yahoo’s email technologies and share these across a number of authorities, if not all 400. If it is possible to support millions of home users across the globe, then we can’t be too many steps towards supporting one system across 400 or more local authorities, and imagine the cost savings that could be brought upon from just this simple example.

What is happening today?

On the 5th Aug 2009 the official Google blog posted ‘The Fighting Irish: A Google Apps Education Success Story‘. Google cites a number of Universities that have successfully shifted their email and document management systems to Google. User satisfaction is significantly improved but more importantly money is saved. Rather a lot of money in fact. In one particular school up to £1 million. This is perhaps a first step towards Edupunk (another interesting story), but I suspect it won’t be much longer until this service is offered to government departments – as we predicted.

If so, let’s run some easy numbers.

  • A University of 15,000 members saves £1 million.
  • UK local government is made up of 410 local authorities.
  • The largest (Birmingham) local authority has around 50,000 employees.
  • The smallest (Isles of Scilly) local authority has around 270 employees.
  • A simple median is 25,135 employees for each authority.
  • That is a saving of circa £1.6 million per authority.
  • Overall this a saving of almost £700 million or £0.7 billion for UK government.
  • That is three new hospitals.
  • Around 80 new primary schools.
  • Or possibly 113 million lives saved (children vaccinated against Malaria in South Africa, for example).

Headlines could soon be reading “What price email? Local government to save £0.7 billion by 2010″. Privacy and security concerns will naturally be raised. This is an important debate, but for me a concern that is based more on control than genuine concerns over privacy. It is not like government has a great track record of keeping data private, see here, here, and here. Google, yahoo or similar probably has better technology, stricter policy and more to loose by breaching privacy.

It is also a great step in reducing the chasm that currently exists between technologies we use in the workplace and the technologies we now use at home. The corporate desktop with outdated software looks almost archaic compared to the very brilliant mix of mobile apps, global networking, web conferencing and wiki pages maintained in the mainstream web environment. Email might be the first to go, but let’s not weap its loss. Let us embrace the freedom and get on with creating, building and delivering. That is where the fun is.

Aug 11

Michael Collins

Unpacking Service Transformation - Oldham In Control.pdf

Michael Collins is a 26 year old resident of Oldham. Michael supports Man Utd and has dreams of becoming a teacher and one day traveling to Australia. Michael is both deaf and blind.

Up to the age of 16 Michael attended a regular school and mixed freely with his peers, engaging on regular activities and excursions. Michael was the only deaf child in the school but this did not hinder his progress. During his years at college Michael was able to learn sign language and therefore communicated regularly with a collection of new friends. It was, though, on a trip to Paris that Michael began to loose his sight - “Everything went blury. I didn’t know what was happening. I was very scared”. This was a traumatic event for Michael and were if not for his friends he would have felt very isolated. Michael discovered that he was able to communicate through sign language and touch.

Michael’s eyesight did not return and he felt himself becoming more withdrawn from the local deaf club. One close friend cited direct payments as an option for Michael and this led to dedicated support – two personal assistants for 12 hours per week. Michael’s confidence quickly returned and because of such positive results he asked to increase the hours to 18. This was accepted.

Later, Michael changed to the Individualised Budgets programe.

“I can do anything with that. I can choose. I decide where I spend the money and where I can go. The Social Worker gives me a pot of money and I keep it in a bank account which is separate from my other current account. I spend the money on PA’s that support me to do what I really want to do. My confidence is really high now”.

The flexibility of Individualised Payments allows Michael to procure close friends as personal assistants. Human contact of this type is very important to Michael’s well-being and sense of safety. Technology, he says, is no substitute to human contact. He trusts his friends. Michael also saves money by procuring his Mum to manage his finances rather than paying for a broker through Oldham In Control.

Michael is now back in control of his own life. His dreams have returned. He talks about breaking away from his parents and owning his own home. In this instance he would need more hours and support, but Michael also has ambitions to earn a teaching qualification and inspire other deaf and blind children with his story.

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The full report is now available. Please click on the link below to read the report or left-click and download.

Unpacking Service Transformation – Oldham In Control

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May 1

‘The’ Most Important Local Government Change Project

It is arguable that the most important local government change project happening now is happening in Oldham. It is their individualised budgets (In Control) project, the most advanced of a flotilla of national schemes around individualised budgets. This concept moves the boundary between state and citizen, between state and the making of the self. Its headlines are:

  • This is a social work of ability, not disability.
  • This mission is to change the organisation of social care so that people who need support can take more control of their own lives and fulfill their role as full citizens: the complete transformation of social care into a system of Self-Directed Support.
  • Oldham now has 60% of its service users on individual budgets, equating to about 1,700.

The full report prepared by Professor Peter Kawalek and myself is now ready to download. Please click on the link below to read the report or left-click and download. I hope you like the formatting!

Unpacking Service Transformation – Oldham In Control

I also have video segments from my conversations with Michael and Jayne, but they have not yet been approved. I hope to have news on this soon. It is compelling stuff.

Apr 20

Leeds By Example: Launches Today

Today marked the launch of three months of research into the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme at Leeds City Council.

The project, although still in its infancy, is innovative and potentially transformational. It means that Leeds is engaged in doing more for the same. It is using its corporate resources in more innovative ways to bring about more public good.

The research sought to better understand how CSR (a term commonly associated with the private-sector) was being translated and adopted within a large local authority. In so doing the research concerned itself with two primary themes:

  1. Changing Lives: CSR projects supported by Leeds City Council and,
  2. The Story: An insight into the people who are making it happen.

The outputs of the research which include a blog, twitter feed, a series of video interviews and written reports can be accessed here or if you prefer the mashups below will give you a flavour of the activity being undertaking at Leeds City Council.

Leeds By Example – The Story

Changing Lives

Oct 30

An Interview with Tom Reynolds

I recently met with Tom Reynolds at a TALK hosted event in London – Innovation and Transformation

Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician for the London Ambulance Service. Most people call him an ‘ambulance driver’. Based in East London he has been writing the blog Random Acts of Reality about his experiences for the past five years.

In this exclusive interview I talk to Tom on a variety of subjects including Generation Y, The Importance of blogging in the Public Sector, Patient Privacy, and what is next for Tom Reynolds himself. Or is it really Tom?

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