Innovation and aspiration: A review of 2023 for Digital Northants
To round off 2023 for Digital Northants, our lead Richard Beards, Innovation Manager for West Northamptonshire Council, reviews the year and gives an insight into what’s coming up in 2024.
Reflecting on Digital Northants in 2023, Merged Futures stands out. It felt like a reboot after two years of virtual events in 2020 and 2021. It was good to return to face-to-face in 2022 but we didn't really have the numbers as people were still getting used to things opening back up. But this year we were back to the excitement of the first year. It was standing room only in all of the sessions and there was a real buzz to the whole day.
Of course, one of the aims of Digital Northants from the very beginning was to promote the idea of a digital hub, a building where companies could get together and co-work. That was always something we wanted to happen. This year, the Vulcan Works has opened in Northampton and that is the co-workspace we've always wanted, so we're really keen to promote that. We're putting on our free events there every couple of months on different topics, for people to share knowledge and get inspired and motivated by what others are doing. So far we've covered eCommerce and digital marketing, followed by digital and business sustainability last time.
Our next event on Friday 26th January will be on Artificial Intelligence and we've already had lots of bookings for that. These events help showcase the Vulcan Works and they also help build momentum as we head towards our sixth edition of Merged Futures next June.
We want people to put on their own events too, which we will help publicise, and there have been a couple of great examples of that this year.
The Marketing Meet-Ups at the Vulcan Works have been fantastic in terms of using that space and promoting it as a digital and collaboration space. Digital Northants wasn’t involved in setting that up but we're going to sponsor some of those events next year. And they'll run our marketing room at Merged Futures, which is brilliant. What Penni Pickering and her team have done is what we really want other people to do.
Jaisant Patel was one of our speakers at Merged Futures this year, on the future of libraries. He took that ethos back to the library service and organised his own event at Central Library in Northampton last month which was all about the power of Virtual Reality. There were several companies who came in to demonstrate their work and let people try out different uses of VR.
Another real enabler this year has been Rob Howe, the Head of Learning Technology at the University of Northampton. He's part of our committee and he's helped to make things happen with the university through his skill to connect people and highlight potential for collaboration. We're not trying to change the world. We're just giving an opportunity to connect with people we know and we will encourage support wherever we can. We will go where the enthusiasm is.
We've got a passion for localism and promoting Northamptonshire, but this is just a part of our day job. Having events throughout the year and Merged Futures in the calendar each June gives us a focal point to find local and innovative stories of people who are using technology to solve problems. We've never set big targets because I think it's all about the power of the stories. We find and share those stories - whether that's on our website, through social media or through the events we hold.
We can fund innovative companies now to solve problems within the council. Because what's changed for me this year is that I moved back from North Northants Council to the West and joined the Digital team in January, in a new role as Innovation Manager with a headline about creating a culture of innovation within the council. That means trying to bring Digital Northants into the council to see how our services can benefit, thinking about the technology available locally and whether services can use it to solve problems.
My role managing the council's web team has always been about trying to improve the way customers could report problems. As Innovation Manager, I'm now focusing on whether innovation can be used to prevent those problems in the first place. The more we can do that, the more everyone benefits.
In the first six months of the year, it was great to be working with Cafe Track and VR Therapies, doing a pilot project with Billing Brook special educational needs school. That involved a small cohort of their students using VR to build confidence with the aim of being able to travel independently. A lot of the kids are not keen on getting buses so they get taxis instead, which are expensive.
The VR pilot gamifies the process and we did 360 filming of a bus, getting the kids used to that environment through using VR. It went really well and the feedback from parents was really encouraging. We're looking for funding to take that on and do an extended pilot over a longer period of time with more kids and hopefully more schools, and to bring in new partners, such as BT and Bosch, with wide experience in this area.
My new role has also been about making relationships within council services and trying to spark new collaborations. I spent some time earlier this year shadowing the council's homelessness team and the empathy they show towards homeless people and their passion for what they do is fantastic. We wanted to do something with that, so we're going to be working in the new year with One 2 One Development Trust, who are talented digital storytellers. They'll be promoting positive stories about recovery from addiction and homelessness - examples of people who have recovered which can help to inspire others.
Like a lot of organisations, we're looking at AI within the council. The council has about 300 online forms that people fill in thousands of times a day. So we're exploring which services could benefit from an element of automation, with a couple of pilots launching in the new year in Special Educational Needs and Revenues and Benefits. This is just an initial exploration of whether we'd be able to automate assessments that come in through those channels, looking at where that information goes to make a better experience and speed up service delivery.
Flytipping is another big issue. We've done some work in collaboration with some of the University of Northampton's MBA students who have researched all the different reasons for flytipping. One of the ideas to solve the problem was using AI and drone technology, which the service are now investigating further in terms of capturing evidence.
A further project is trying to encourage the use of predictive analytics to enable services to understand which people may need our help much earlier than they present to us, to see if we can intervene before they need more specialist or critical support.
We've got great links with the University of Northampton. We want more collaboration between council services and the university to get students work placements and projects. Flytipping was a great example and we could get them working on lots of other problem statements. Whether that's IT development students, games design students or data analytics students - there's a whole pipeline of talent for work placements which would be massively beneficial on both sides and an emerging workforce we can help to upskill.
Another part of the role is to do with aspiration. I was recently at a local school for children with special educational needs talking to them about websites, but they were more interested in showing me videos of LEGO and Minecraft. So we're organising some training for them in stop motion animation with an animation expert involved in the Northampton Film Festival, for kids to learn those technologies.
The aim there is hopefully for the children to submit a film for the festival next year, which would promote the Women's Rugby World Cup coming to Northampton in 2025. We're always looking for ideas like that where we can create opportunities for people and positivity around Northamptonshire at the same time.
In that specific case, it's about eventually making people more employable as well as giving opportunities and showing what technology can offer to different people. It's all about laying that foundation for the future.
I've just got a real passion for finding ways technology can help improve people's lives and I'm excited about what that means for West Northants Council and Digital Northants in 2024.
Want to get involved?
Get your free ticket for our AI and Creativity event at the Vulcan Works on Friday 26 January 2024.