Experience of UK GovCamp

UK GovCamp is a free event that happens every January.

It’s an unconference, which basically means there’s no agenda until people pitch their ideas at the beginning of the day, which you can then chat about in various different rooms around the building, moving around at your leisure.

Find out more about it on the UK GovCamp website.

A few of us from Essex went down, had a fab time and met some lovely people. With so many different sessions available, everyone’s experience is different. Here’s what mine was like.

Thinking about inclusive consent forms

My colleague Claire Craig is running a design sprint about how to make consent forms work with demand avoidance.

She’s got me involved in this a bit, and pitched a session on this topic, which was combined with lovely content designer Neil Fazakerley’s pitch about trauma informed content design.

It was a brilliant session with lots of user researchers and people with lived experience sharing their thoughts about how to make the user research process more inclusive, and less extractive.

Accessibility tips

Then went straight into a session about accessibility. The person running it had a lot of knowledge and we were free to ask questions. We had the usual cathartic chats about unnecessary PDFs, and some folks shared interesting ideas about offering different formats and giving people options (some might prefer an infographic, some text, video, audio, important to offer options so people can find what works for them).

One thing somebody said that stuck with me was “people have failed service assessments because they used Microsoft products. Don’t assume it’s accessible because it’s Microsoft.”

Why are we still talking about digital transformation

This was a session challenging why we’re still talking about this and why things haven’t moved faster.

There was lots of interesting chat about the people, not the tech and all that usual good stuff.

The thing that stuck with me was that the usual ‘people can order an Amazon package and get it tomorrow, why not the same in gov’ topic came up. And while I think that framing made sense 10 years ago, looking at the state of everything now: you can’t ‘just Google it’ anymore, websites that trick you into buying things you don’t want, the real, human cost behind cheap, fast delivery services… I’m not sure this is the best comparison for making good public services.

Leadership dos and don’ts

Public Digital ran a session on leadership dos and don'ts in leadership.

There were lots of friendly, smart people in the room and we were paired up and asked to come up with ideas to stick on post its.

I did find myself drawing a blank and not having much to say on the subject. It might be that I’ve generally worked with experienced leaders in this space, who have set up the team and culture in a way that means I don’t think about them all that much. Their work is super important but invisible. If things were in a more negative place I might have more opinions. If you’re reading this, leaders, hope you’re well and keeping hydrated.

FailCamp

Can’t share single word people said in this session. Lips — sealed. But was a great way to end the day, people shared really openly about tricky experiences when things had gone wrong.