Thursday 29 October 2009

Digital Greenwich - A new project and the HS-IT combo

Before anything else, I feel the need to say that: Blogger has THE  WORST editor.  Now, here is the post I finished about 45' earlier:

New project

For the second learning cycle, we had the chance to choose between 4 projects, the one we want to work on for the next 5 weeks. The project I chose was 'Digital Greenwich', which brief was:

Produce a proposal that articulates Greenwich Council's commitment to using digital technology and the digitisation of its services to positively enhance the experience of this London Borough for its different communities.

The reason of my choice is that this is a real-world project, as Greenwich's council is already working. Also, the council will supervise our project; provide critique and if everything works well, use the whole or parts of it. So, what would be better of a not realistic but real project, which benefits the society?

What's up with Greenwich?
On Wednesday we had a meeting with Mr. Shaun, the Human Resources and Information Technology director of Greenwich council. Weird combination which works though, according to him. The meeting lasted about an hour in which Mr. Shaun firstly gave us an idea of what is going on in Greenwich (location, places of interest etc) and then stated us the problems it faces, the ones the digitalization of the Borough should fight against or at least overcome. He also gave us loads of information of the level the Greenwich's citizens are engaged with technology, something really important as it will help us to define which is the best medium or media we will use in our project. Mr. Shaun is also going to provide us several statistics for this purpose.


Woolwich (a key area according to Mr. Shaun) foot tunnel

Project leader's suggestions
After the meeting with Mr. Shaun, we had a talk with the project leader, Mr. Martin who suggested:
1. The services should be for everybody; we should not exlude any group of Greenwich's citizens.
2. In the development process of our proposal, we should think long-term.
3. We could start by addressing the citizens' needs.
4. We should define what's the level of information and services provided for the citizens now.

Action!
The first step we took is #4 from Mr. Martin's suggestions, as each one of us selected a medium (mobile, web, cable-tv, etc.) to investigate how it is currently used for the citizens (what is provided, quality). I chose the tech "love of my life", web. Apart from that we will follow #3 as we will start meeting people from Greenwich trying to define their needs, so later we will be able to shape the services we will propose according to them. After all, happy citizens equals happy borough equals success, isn't it.

The quote
The government would fund a project with legs: Measurable outcomes in reasonable time. (Mr. Shaun)

To-do
Now, I have to do a research on the use of web by the Greenwich council and after that a kind of "live action" will take place, for #3 mentioned above.. well, since Mr. Shaun referred to gangs I'm not really into it, but if it's for the society . .

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