Working in the open - the Local Digital Declaration

At the beginning of September, Maidstone joined a growing number of local authorities and signed the Local Digital Declaration.

The declaration embodies five principles of internet age local public services. These are:

• We will go even further to redesign our services around the needs of the people using them. This means continuing to prioritise citizen and user needs above professional, organisational and technological silos.
• We will ‘fix our plumbing’ to break our dependence on inflexible and expensive technology that doesn’t join up effectively. This means insisting on modular building blocks for the IT we rely on, and open standards to give a common structure to the data we create.
• We will design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information to build trust among our partners and citizens, to better support the most vulnerable members of our communities, and to target our resources more effectively.
• We will demonstrate digital leadership, creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation to happen, and challenging all those we work with to embrace this Local Digital Declaration.
• We will embed an open culture that values, incentivises and expects digital ways of working from every member of our workforce. This means working in the open wherever we can, sharing our plans and experience, working collaboratively with other organisations, and reusing good practice

What are the next steps

This blog is the first step towards meeting the declaration commitments, by allowing us to share our plans, successes and failures.

In the coming months we will take further steps to share how the Service Design and Digital teams run projects at Maidstone, the tools we use as well as publishing details of the projects we are working.

Find out more about the declaration. If you have any comments or questions please get in touch by email