Today is Food Revolution Day, a global day of action for people to make a stand for good food and essential cooking skills. It’s a chance for people to come together within their homes, schools, workplaces and communities to cook and share their kitchen skills, food knowledge and resources.

Jamie Oliver, who’s Better Food Foundation is behind the campaign, explains it all:

One of the aims of Food Revolution Day is to share cooking skills and food knowledge, and to join forces within communities and get as many people involved as possible – aims that we share at Casserole Club.

Food Revolution Day and it’s aims to share food knowledge coincides nicely with this week’s release of a report on the State of the Sharing Economy. As well as highlighting growth and key trends in this sector, the findings from The People Who Share shows that sharing is becoming an addition to the traditional, non-circular economic system and is here to stay.

Casserole gets a nice mention of the report, so it’s great to see that the project is helping the Sharing Economy spread in the UK and beyond.

If you want to get involved with Food Revolution Day and take part in the Sharing Economy, sign up Casserole Club or come along to our Casserole Lunch in Bethnal Green on Saturday 18 May. More details and a form to sign up here: http://bit.ly/LunchLove

So, don’t forget: Food Revolution Day is today. Get involved and find out more here: http://foodrevolutionday.com

Our food sharing project Casserole Club is looking for a Community Engagement Intern to help promote and support our work in Tower Hamlets and Barnet.

Casserole Club is a community food-sharing initiative encouraging people to” do something great with an extra plate”. The project connects enthusiastic Cooks who don’t mind making an extra portion of dinner occasionally with an older Diner who would appreciate a home-cooked meal.

You can read more about Casserole Club in Waitrose Magazine, The Guardian and Time Out London.

The internship is for 5 half days a week (hours negotiable) for a minimum of eight weeks, and we’d like you to start asap. This position will be paid at London Living Wage.

This will be a fantastic opportunity to learn about community engagement, volunteer recruitment and management, and social media marketing. There will be full training provided for the role and the work will be supervised by our Lead Organiser, but interns are expected to be able to work independently  and use their initiative.

The full role description and application procedure is available to download here (PDF).

To apply, send us your written application and CV to hello(at)casseroleclub(dot)com with the title ‘Community Engagement Internship’.

The application deadline is Thursday 23rd May, so what are you waiting for? Get going!

The team over at Shift Surrey have been blogging about their Election Dashboard, which was developed in-house using an “agile” process (more on that process in the post).

In a Q&A with the development team - Chris Spring, Sue Shoesmith and Drew Daruval – the post looks at the background to the project, what the design process was and what the positive points of working this way were:

“It’s nice to get decisions on functionality or style made quickly rather than waiting to arrange meetings for a load of people to debate the merits of one colour over another.  This is achieved by constantly re-evaluating the priorities of each product deliverable and ensuring those deliverables are small enough that quick decisions can be made about their fate or functionality.”

The team are also honest about the things that didn’t go well. This openness is important for them to evolve the process and way of working:

“Bottom line is we were integrating with a newer Surrey County Council micro site branding, developing for multi- form factors, trialling a new way of working and using some quite important data, so there’s bound to be areas that could be tuned to make the next election site even better.”

We’re enormously proud of Development Project #1 from Shift Surrey (a hefty degree of honesty on the FAQ, including team credits and outlining the technology stack, are a personal favourite).

It also took guts to change their way of working with such a tight, immovable deadline. Multi-disciplinary teams are difficult to protect in siloed organisations, so a thank you goes to the teams whose people were borrowed too.

All in all a successful agile testcase like this will hopefully help to take this way of working into bigger and more impactful service areas. We look forward to seeing what the team get up to next.

View the full Q&A here >>
View the Election Dashboard here >>

It’s T-20 days until the food-sharing highlight of the year. On 2nd June, it’s World Food Sharing Day AND The Big Lunch. A foodie serendipity.

To make the countdown even more exciting, and mark the launch of our new Casserole Club, we’ve set a challenge for the good people of Tower Hamlets. In the next 20 days, can you sign up to cook and deliver one meal to an older neighbour?

To take part just go to the Casserole Club website, sign up to Cook and deliver at least one meal this month.

I bet you’re thinking “Just one meal? Even I could do that!” We bet you could too, so sign up to Casserole Club now.

Fancy cooking every day? That’s great, but if you only cook once this month, then that’s perfectly fine as well.

There’s a fantastic prize lined up for one lucky Casserole Cook who takes part which we’ll draw out of a hat, and an even better prize for the person who shares the most meals.

We’ll also be giving a shout-out to everyone who successfully challenged the website on Facebook and Twitter on 2nd June.

Any questions? Just leave a comment below and we’ll get right back to you.

So if you live in Tower Hamlets and want to do great with an extra plate, what are you waiting for? Sign up to Casserole Club and get cooking!

The Camden Challenge has launched today and is now open for entries!

Following Camden Council’s Data Hack Day that took place on Friday, with Google and the Big Innovation Centre, Camden have teamed up with FutureGov to ask people to come up with great ideas in response two important questions:

- “What can we do to enable people on low incomes in Camden thrive?” This is all about making people’s money go further or finding new ways to support them reaching their goals and aspirations

- “How can we use space better in Camden?” Here, we are looking for good ideas to unlock the potential of forgotten corners, empty shops or underused buildings and land to create something meaningful for local people to use.

The Camden Challenge is an open innovation competition where we are looking for people to think differently about solving these problems and to come up with ideas for projects that will genuinely make a difference to local people’s lives.

The Challenge is launching on Simpl Challenges today, where people can submit ideas of their own and browse and comment on ideas that have been submitted by other people.

The first event in the Camden Challenge will be the “How to be a Changemaker” workshop – an afternoon of inspirational talks and idea creation workshops, being held in the Camden City Learning Centre on 16th May (this Thursday!) The event is all about getting people thinking about the challenge questions and sharing different tools and techniques for creating innovative responses to them. If you are interested in coming along, please sign up here.

The deadline for submitting ideas to the challenge will be 23 June 2013. After the deadline has passed, a shortlist of ideas will be selected to take to the Camden Challenge Day, Saturday 6th July.

At the Camden Challenge Day, idea owners will collaborate with teams of designers, developers, service users, residents and professions to work up their ideas and present them to a panel of judges at the end of the day. Sign up here to join in – you don’t have to submit an idea to be part of one of the teams. The winning teams will go on to receive a summer of top notch support to take their projects from being good ideas into viable projects that they will pitch at a Dragon’s Den Day in front of potential funders and supporters in the early autumn.

If you live, work, study or are active in Camden, get involved by coming along to one of our events, submit your best ideas to the Camden Challenge and help make Camden an even better borough.

For all of the latest news follow Simpl Challenges on Twitter @simplco or e-mail Lucy on lucy [at] wearefuturegov [dot] com.

I know Prince2 gets some bad press these days – often with good reason. However, whether you love or hate Prince2, it is also the methodology that the Public Sector and in particular Local Government have invested most heavily in.

Like it or not, if you are delivering in the public sector you are at best likely to rub up against some Prince2 legacy. At worst, a head on collision with a full on Prince2 programme office policing every aspect of the project.

At FutureGov, we have been working with a number of local authorities on a range of different projects, some light touch on project management and some requiring something a little more detailed.  Within these projects, we have done our best to develop products and ideas in an Agile  (with a capital ‘A’) way.

But there are tensions:  Developers are committed to developing in an Agile way , but project managers often need something a little more “fixed” for clients.

We thought it would be useful to reflect on some of the lessons learned along the way and some of the behaviours required to create a successful managed and Agile project.

1. An Agile Attitude?

The one thing I know for sure is that there is no clear-cut definition of what an Agile Development Methodology is. Even within our own team we have different ideas and approaches for developing a product and running projects.

But there does seem to be a few characteristics that stand out as helpful:

- Know the problem you are trying to solve. As much as possible, keep that problem simple. Bigger problems can feel overwhelming so best to start with something small and then iterate and enhance regularly.

-Pay attention to the group or team process that sits around “Agile working”. By being intentional about this, we can use collective energy to come to new understandings and possibilities for the product.  Valuing multiple perspectives is helpful and healthy, and means the development of the product sits squarely in the middle as everyone’s responsibility.

- A team with the ability to have difficult conversations, to debate dilemmas and that can name and frame issues (more on this later).

- To get good quality and regular feedback from users, listen to this feedback and base iterations on this.

- Pace is important.  There should be a deliberate plan to pick up pace and build energy around one or two things.  Equally important is to plan some thinking time or review time in between these “sprints”.  It sounds kind of obvious but to use the sprint metaphor – you can’t sprint a marathon and most products and projects are more like a marathon than the 100m. Plan for the uptime and the downtime.

2. Be Able to Have Difficult Conversations

One of the most important qualities to work in an agile way is the ability to have difficult conversations.  For me this is framed very clearly around debating, challenging and critiquing ideas, not people.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, generally speaking if people have felt that they have been heard, then they can commit to whatever the decision is.  If debate hasn’t happened and there is no commitment then you might find yourselves having the same conversation again and again.

This is both frustrating and unhelpful for the product and at it’s worst can result in veiled conversations with people not committing or being accountable to any decision that is made.

3. Frame the Problem Correctly

Another important aspect is to really attack the problem but to go easy on the person.  This can be tricky if sometimes it feels like the people are the problem.

Always be clear on what the problem is you are trying to solve and this becomes much easier.  Einstein once said:

“If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions”

Don’t waste time, debating and finding solutions to problems that don’t matter.

4. Agile Does Not Mean No Rigour

At FutureGov we want people to do their very best work and in turn deliver the very best products and services for our customers.  Rigour is an important aspect of this, rigour in planning, rigour in evaluating, rigour in testing, rigour in evidencing and on it goes.  Agile should never be an excuse for lack of rigour.

That’s how I feel about Agile, coming from a Prince2 background. What are your thoughts? What has worked for you? Leave your comments below.

Photo via Jens Hoffman

Thanks to everyone that came to our first Casserole Club afternoon tea in Tower Hamlets last week. A merry time was had by all, and copious amounts of carrot cupcakes were consumed.

Our next meetup is on Saturday 18th May at The Create Place in Bethnal Green, London. We’ll be bringing Cooks and Diners together to share lunch, so sign up now and remember to bring a dish plus several friends: http://casserolelunch.eventbrite.co.uk/

You can bring any dish you like – savoury, sweet, something in between – as long as it can be shared with others. We already have two professional chefs signed up as local Cooks, so it’s going to be a veritable feast.

If the conversation last time was anything to judge by, expect musings on everything from unicorns to the best way to cook sweet potato!

You might have also seen that Casserole Club has been featured in Friday’s Evening Standard, this month’s Morrisons Magazine and Time Out.

We’re a hot ticket, so book your lunch place now and do great with an extra plate: http://casserolelunch.eventbrite.co.uk/ ]]> http://wearefuturegov.com/2013/05/sharing-the-lunch-love-with-casserole-club/feed/ 0 http://wearefuturegov.com/2013/05/patchwork-kicks-off-in-surrey/ http://wearefuturegov.com/2013/05/patchwork-kicks-off-in-surrey/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 14:56:05 +0000 Kirsty Elderton http://wearefuturegov.com/?p=16155

As if kicking off Patchwork in Australia isn’t enough, this week also sees Patchwork get rolling in Surrey County Council.

Patchwork is one of a number of projects that FutureGov is partnering with Surrey on as part of the Shift Surrey innovation lab. It will be anchored in the Family Support Programme, helping practitioners to connect as a team around the family, building on related work both Staffordshire and Brighton are leading supported by Patchwork.

It is a another big step forward for Patchwork, where it will be made available to all council teams, partner agencies and the voluntary sector covering over one million people (almost 2% of the UK).

We’re genuinely excited at the prospect of supporting better partnership working, meaning local services and practitioners coordinating their work together earlier to deliver better outcomes for families. Having now been in Surrey kicking things off for a few weeks now, we thought it might be useful to share some of the lessons we’ve gained from working with Surrey.

1.  Know what the barriers are

Surrey have usefully spent a lot of time thinking about what the barriers to partnership working are and aren’t. As a result they know frontline practitioners want to develop teams around families and to work together earlier, the issue for them is How?

Any solution to this needs to take account of the size of the county council, the differing nature of the boroughs within it and the fluid nature of families moving in, out and around Surrey.

What we notice on our work with Patchwork and other projects is that everyone involved wants to make partnership working simpler and easier for frontline staff. In Surrey’s case, step forward Patchwork.

2.  Leadership + Vision = Difference

Surrey have provided strong and visible leadership to the project.  They have been engaged and working closely with FutureGov to not just sponsor the project but to really lead it.  They have been able to articulate clearly what the end of this part of the story should look like for staff and clients alike so they understand the journey they are on.

The whole point of any change project is take people from A to B with B being a better place, if B can’t be described then how will you compel people to join you and crucially how will you know when you have made it there?

For Surrey they have been really clear that they want all practitioners working with their initial 400+ troubled families to be connecting with each other via Patchwork so that partnerships that already exist can be strengthened and amplified across all partners organisations and families.

Knowing the difference you want to see gives any project a better chance of success.

3. Empowering and giving rather than closing down and controlling

Another interesting aspect of the Surrey approach is that there is a very strong sense that this should be in the first instance an internal change project, where Patchwork as a tool can drive broader organisational change.

By embracing the social technology that is Patchwork, the council wants to put the responsibility for building relationships for frontline practitioners back to practitioners.

There is a very visible story or measure of success around the range of organisations / agencies in Patchwork growing, as a visible manifestation of this.

However there is also an equally important unsaid story about empowering and trusting practitioners to know who needs to be invited in to a case and giving them the ability to make that connection simply and easily.

Patchwork is tool designed by practitioners for practitioners so this approach really resonates with us and our guess will be that it will resonate with frontline workers too as Patchwork is rolled out.

We will be blogging regularly about lessons from the project and all things Patchwork on the blog, so please do check it out.

There’s been lots of interest FutureGov’s work with Lewes District Council on re-thinking support for the financially vulnerable, where we’ve been working with local people on benefits to explore where the real pinch points are in their lives and what can we do to meet them.

Research conducted so far shows that “payday loans” feature highly in the lives of these people, where companies such as Wonga provide loans with APR as high as 360% (or over 4000% Representative APR) compared to 6.2% to 28.6% from the London Capital Credit Union, the first Credit Union to offer this service. There is an obvious imbalance here that needs to be addressed.

Our research has also shown that more of the local people we are working with have access to mobile phones than a computer, as owning a mobile phone is more of a priority. This all leads to the idea of creating a mobile product that empowers people with limited means to take control of their lives through better borrowing and saving habits.

The result of this research is Popcash, a concept for a safe and secure mobile product that enables people to access low interest loans from responsible lenders, such as credit unions, to rival high-interest “payday lenders”.

supported by 

As part of Big Data Week 2013, FutureGov and HUB Westminster spent a couple of hours talking all things data.  The panel of 11 brilliant speakers had five minutes to do a Lightning Talk on how they’ve solved social problems by using data creatively, while the questions and discussion were passionate and got people fired up to make good use of data.

There was a packed out audience at Hub Westminster, as well as people following the live feed, and they got to hear about a wide range of data-related insights, from Maximising the Benefits of Open Data to Solving the Problem of Potholes with Data.  There was nearly a potholes punch-up, but thankfully all ended amicably.

Many thanks to Capita for supporting the event, to HUB Westminster for hosting, and to all speakers (and attendees) for some awesome, thought-provoking presentations and discussions.

If you missed the event, you can find a Storify of the event here, a Twitter list of those involved here,  and many of the speakers’ presentations are below or on the FutureGov Slideshare channel.

What Big Data insights did you take away from the event? How are you thinking of using data in your work? Leave a comment below!

Solving the Problem of Potholes with Data – Ben Unsworth

Light at the End of the Pothole – Carrie Bishop, FutureGov

Focus on the User Need – Helen Olsen

Maximising the Benefits of Open Data – Stuart Harrison

Data Driven Public Services – Mark Charmer, Akvo

(Open) Data Driven Public Services – Tim Davies, Open Data Research Network

Quantified Self – Adriana Lukas

Big Data Done Better – Francine Bennett