What holds government back from helping Civic Tech projects scale?

Breandán Knowlton

19 Mar 2019, 3 p.m.
Room CC9, Level -1 (Conference Centre)

Every local and regional authority has an important duty to support the health and wellbeing of the public, providing services to address issues from air quality to efficient transportation and social isolation.

Civic Technology projects and collaborations have a track record of directly supporting citizens to easily connect with public services and improve their quality of life. However, all too many Civic Tech and government initiatives struggle to achieve self-sustainability when they move from pilot to full-scale deployment.

The UK government’s GovTech Catalyst innovation fund has been experimenting with new ways to support local authorities and other public bodies to define innovative local technology-enabled projects.

Having crowdsourced 15 policy challenge areas, they’ll be supporting and learning from projects including everything from accurate waste tracking to fire service situational awareness. User research has turned up some interesting barriers to achieving the desired scaling, and this workshop hopes to explore these with delegates.

Building on themes from user research, we’ll classify some of the factors that are holding back efficient public-private partnerships in Civic Tech and look at the feasibility and impact of some mitigation strategies.

Video

Slides

What holds government back from helping Civic Tech projects scale? (Breandán Knowlton, Government Digital Service, UK) from mysociety