VCS and Council Data Exchange

The VCS and Council Data Exchange project receives £80,000 from the Local Digital C-19 Challenge.

The project receives £150,000 of follow-on funding from the Local Digital Fund to continue their work.

During the next phase, the project will move from theory to practice. Two exemplar projects will take place to adopt and test the method outlined in the user guide:

• A project led by Central Bedfordshire Council will focus on a use case around the availability of information provided by the council and Citizens Advice
• A project led by London Borough of Camden will focus on a use case on emergency food deliveries

The project also hopes to uncover common lessons to inform the creation of a new public data store – one that brings in data from, and makes data available to, the VCS sector and local public service organisations.

This project aimed to improve information flows between councils and Voluntary Community Services (VCS), to enable them to better support vulnerable residents and communities in the wake of COVID-19.

The project team published a guest blog post on our medium channel. You can get involved with their work, and join in the conversation.

Two sessions of user research were held with Camden’s VCS strategic partners: Covent Garden Dragon Hall trust, Highgate Newtown Community Centre, C4 Consortium and Kentish Town Community Centre.

User research was focused on gathering key quotes and emerging themes around data exchange and sharing, and what interventions would be helpful.

The team also attended the Food Mission Update Meeting, which is also attended by Corporate Services, Community Services and Public Health. We Make Camden’s ‘food mission’ is focused on enabling ‘access to food for all’.

Since the last sprint the project has drafted their User Research output document, which pulls together the outcomes of multiple one-hour interviews and team analysis workshops.

They also attended the Camden Food Mission to hear about current developments on Camden’s strategy and direction planning.

Lastly, they held a planning session and product session to agree their upcoming priorities and set the direction and timelines for upcoming priority areas.

This sprint, the Camden team has:

• welcomed Vanessa Deliyanni to the team, who will be working to develop UX elements of the project
• developed an initial list of data that relates to the Food Mission
• moved the project to JIRA, which is a tool used across Camden

They also began developing user experience wireframes for the Camden Insights Plus and Camden Food Mission Data Hub products on their Miro board.

The Camden team will soon be joined by a new member who will be responsible for User Experience Design and Delivery Management.

They will be tasked with building the user experience design of two products (Camden Insights Plus and Camden Food Mission Data Hub).

The Bedfordshire team is working on a strategic plan which will be launched next year and will focus on the key principle of ‘fairness’.

They have identified two workstreams:

• a low-income dashboard
• pathways that residents take when accessing advice

The team will now draft a business case so they can identify the resources required.

Sarah from the Bedfordshire team has been exploring the opportunity to develop greater joint working to support those on low incomes in Central Bedfordshire.

She has created an options paper that sets out the rationale of powering this by sharing insight on those who are experiencing low income through a dashboard, and bringing data from the council and its external partners together.

The next steps are to:

• conduct an initial sketching workshop in January
• identify key datasets that would be incorporated into a dashboard
• specify the purpose and organisational design for collaboration and dashboard
• look to recruit technical expertise.

Meanwhile, the Camden team has:

• welcomed their new Delivery Manager, Bruno!
• reviewed the food data list and developed a plan to refine the list, with a view to finalise the data sets by early January
• ran a product workshop to refine propositions, outlining the relationship between users, their needs and the data
• considered UX, delivery process, roadmap and tools to use for the project.

The Camden team continues to work in one-week sprints and has just completed Sprint 5. They have conducted four more tests with four participants using user interface designs in Figma. This was a great team effort and valuable insights were gained from users — these will be fed into the future design of the product.

The project has just completed its eighth sprint, during which the team has:

• completed a clickable prototype of the Camden Insights website, with a design that is refocused on the user needs of those who are less data-literate
• conducted user research sessions with six out of the eight participants, to test the new clickable prototype and gather feedback using the user experience (UX) storyboards created
• developed UX storyboards for the Food Mission Data Hub
• continued work on the discussion guide and final project report

In March the Camden team presented its end-of-phase Show and Tell, during which they provided an overview of their work so far and outlined their next steps. View the Show and Tell slides (opens in Google Slides).

The team from Camden also met to discuss their proposed impact measurement and has provided us with their draft end-of-phase report.

The Camden team presented their final Show and Tell for this phase. View the Show and Tell slides or watch the video recording.

The team also produced their end of phase report.

The VCS and Council Data Exchange project was temporarily paused from May 2022 to June 2023, but it has now resumed at Central Bedfordshire. The goal is to complete the project within the next 6 to 9 months, as part of their work on ‘fairness’.