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Laying the foundations for better local public services

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Sedgemoor District Council

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

Applicant details

Project title: All services directory

Current stage: Discovery

Partners involved: Sedgemoor District Council. Filter on 'directory of services' theme to see potential partners.

Service Finder

Hundreds of organisations provide services to a ‘place’, such as public services, commissioned services, registered services, voluntary/community groups, and commercial services.

A person with a ‘need’ may have difficulty in finding the right services; indeed practitioners supporting vulnerable groups can also struggle to know what service provision is available.

Some ‘needs’ are straight-forward, such as removing an old fridge, whereas others may suggest a programme of activity and interventions such as

  • preventing homelessness
  • loneliness

We would like to discover

  • what are the geographic, social, and financial barriers to accessing digital public services;
  • how customers and practitioners would prefer to find the right services to meet a need;
  • existing types of service directories e.g.
    • Children’s/Family Services
    • Personalisation/Social Care
  • what standards and APIs could be used to pull these together – e.g.
    • openReferral
    • open311
    • The LGA’s ‘Needs to Service’ ontology and vocabularies
    • Local Links
    • schema.org
  • how to maintain quality, perhaps with customer feedback, or a ‘gatekeeper’ role.
  • efficiencies and improved outcomes from enabling apps and portals to discover local services.

We would expect to engage with

  • The LGA
  • The Future City Catapult
  • VISA
  • Our local CAB
  • Suppliers of Service Register products and services

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Introduction to user research
  • Introduction to service design
  • Agile for teams

Other training requests

The Council has already trained a number of staff to DSDM Agile practitioner level. We would like to re-inforce that with ‘GDS Agile Teams’ training and tools to ensure that we can collaborate with other teams.