Four weeks ago, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, now based in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, brought 150 tech experts and town planning gurus from across the country together for a “hackathon”.
The two-day event, held at Leeds University’s Nexus innovation hub, was designed to create digital solutions to specific problems facing the planning system that MHCLG had identified.
The summit – properly named the Local Government Innovation Hackathon – was the first such event since DSIT launched the Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government in January. One of that policy paper's goals is for the reoriented Government Digital Service to “catalyse change and join-up across the wider public sector”, and the 30 April-1 May hackathon was an embodiment of the intent.
Fifteen teams assembled by MHCLG brought together participants from across government, local authorities and the private sector to pit their wits to find solutions for allotted challenges.
The winning entry was an application that transforms raw data from planning decision notices into usable insight about a site’s planning history.
The runner up was a prototype AI solution to automate the extraction of relevant policies for planning applications.
Civil Service World talked to i.AI head of strategy Michael Padfield and Greater London Authority chief digital officer Theo Blackwell – currently on secondment at DSIT – to find out more about the event.
Q: What is a hackathon?
MP: A hackathon is where you get a group of technically-minded people together into one room to try and build novel solutions to problems that you have identified.
What we did up in Leeds was that we were hacking the planning system, so we brought together digital and data experts from central government and local government, but also subject-matter experts from local authorities and planners to build real prototypes of tools to improve the planning system.
TB: It’s an innovation environment. It’s different to doing a one-off workshop or a series of seminars. And the joy of it is that it’s multi-disciplinary. You’re getting planners together and you’re getting technologists. You’re getting data people and you’re getting people from academia, the public sector and the private sector. So you’ve got a mix of views.
It’s a world apart from going “let’s have an internal workshop”
Q: Is a hackathon the same as a sprint?
TB: No. A sprint’s a different sort of thing. A sprint would be using a specific methodology to test out hypotheses. That’s what I’m doing at the moment with the Local Government Collaboration Sprint. We’re testing a bunch of hypotheses that have come out of the Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government, about how GDS should support local government. The way that works is we do a “discovery” phase, test and iterate those hypotheses, test the next set and come back with some recommendations.
There’s a relationship between the two things. The hackathon was the perfect component, if you like, of the work that the sprint was doing to make sure that it actually involved engagement outside the walls of Whitehall.
MP: For hackathons, it’s about ideas-generation; thinking beyond your usual boundaries of what you might be coming up with in your team in the office and having laser focus on just building something that offers a unique perspective on a solution.
Q: Presumably there’s a minimum amount of tech knowledge that everyone taking part needed to have?
MP: That wasn’t quite the case, actually. There were some people who were really quite non-technical in the digital sense but expert in their domain, like being a local authority planner. One of the beauties of the hackathon is that its shows people what is possible with tech. And it’s also quite successful at upskilling them to get their hands on tech for the first time, because they might not have had the opportunity to experiment before.
TB: I totally agree. One of the benefits of this process is stealth learning; learning by doing. You might get someone who’s a very experienced planner, but who might be a bit phobic of the digital space. But by seeing the art of the possible, seeing the power of working with people, it’ll take people on a journey. So, actually, there’s an element of “the more I can work in a team like this, the more I can do – and serve people better”. There’s the idea itself, and there’s the self-learning. It’s really, really important.
Photo: GDS
Q: How were the teams assembled and the challenges distributed?
TB: The four challenge statements for the hackathon were derived from our colleagues in digital planning in MHCLG. They said: “We’ve progressed so far in our transformation journey. We now think there’s a series of questions we would like to test in a multi-disciplinary way.” They set those challenges, which are essentially the categories for the hackathon.
We had over 400 people apply for 150 spots. We did a technical skills survey, because you have to have people who can build things, so we paired up people with genuine cutting-edge AI expertise with people from local government, planners, people who knew the topic, to create 15 multi-disciplinary teams.
The participants indicated in advance which of the challenge statements they were most interested to work on and then we sorted teams accordingly, although there was flexibility on the day for people to move to different teams and different challenge statements.
There were people representing 35 different local authorities who travelled from across the country: Somerset, Gateshead. Leeds itself. The pull to do this was really, really strong.
TB: People also came from Coventry, Birmingham and Leicester. There were representatives from some London boroughs as well – Camden, Lambeth, Westminster. We also had the Planning Inspectorate there.
"Local government is an absolutely fertile territory for breaking down silos"
Theo Blackwell
Q: Is it fair to say the participants were split fairly evenly between central government, local government and the private sector?
MP: Probably fewer private sector and more central government and local government. But it was “open” in the sense that there were a few private-sector people.
Q: What might future hackathons look at?
TB: One of the recommendations of the Local Government Collaboration Sprint is that GDS engages much more in innovation environments, which could be anything from hackathons and datathons, on the one hand, through to more formal and more technical matters. Take risks to test out ideas.
In the local government space, costs have been driven by social care and temporary accommodation. But there’s also a great deal of interest in local government’s governance of place. Local government’s a fascinating area, because it deals with not just how people use services transactionally but also with location as well. I think local government is an absolutely fertile territory for breaking down silos, bringing people together, and engaging with Michael’s team at i.AI.
MP: We in the incubator are really keen to develop our work with local government. You can see on our website our work with Project Extract, which is about digitising planning documents, and so helping local authorities convert PDFs into geospatial data, like local-government transcription. There’s all sorts of stuff that we can be doing.
I think we can say that the Leeds model seemed to really work. There was so much excitement around it.