Weeknotes 22: working in the open

my new Hackney values lanyard — I chose ‘open’

So, week 3. It’s beginning to feel more familiar, and it’s been another interesting week of learning loads, and meeting great people. I’ve also collected several lovely lanyards and am finding it difficult to decide which one to wear each day.

Working in the open

Everyone can contribute to a better working environment by being more open and honest about what they’re doing. Sharing work with colleagues helps us break down the barriers between silos, and helps us work together more effectively for the residents. Share widely, and share often; share with people who may not have actually asked about what you’re doing (just because they haven’t asked, doesn’t mean they’re not interested).

The more we share, the better our work gets. HackIT manifesto

Five things that happened

So — here are 5 things that happened this week related to openness, sharing and community.

Matthew Cain and I ran a session on how to name a service — based on the excellent slides and blog posts from Tom Hewitson and Lou Downe (thankyou)* and our own experiences. It seem to go down well – and was a nice intro for me for conversations with people I hadn’t met before.
I went to a great show and tell about Hackney’s Tenancy API and the collaborative working between Made Tech, our development team (thanks Rashmi and Vlad), our architecture team and between different teams in HackIT. There’s a real sense of excitement about this work, and the collaboration and innovation it’s demonstrating.
I had a great call with Katie and Joash from AWS, and Esmay from the Hackney Works team about our digital apprenticeship programme and how we might collaborate together – and help our apprentices build their networks and experience. Lots of great ideas and opportunities from both sides.
We had a GDPR training session which was really informative — and helped me better understand the local authority context. I was reminded of seeing these brilliant posters from Co-op digital:

Making the General Data Protection Regulation easier to understand

5. I caught up with the awesome Dan Barrett which was lovely — and resulted in a great conversation with Matthew Cain and Dan about lots of stuff — data, forming teams, delivering value to users, complex processes and organisations.