I’m excited to announce I’ll be visting Oman next week for the Oman Competitiveness Forum.

I’ve been invited to join a panel to discuss Trialing Public Policy’ as part of a larger discussion on public sector innovation, with the whole conference covering new skills needed for public and civil servants in ‘the 21st civil servant’, public service and citizen engagement and innovation as a whole in this sector.  You will be able to follow the event on #OCF14  via twitter.
With alot of projects in this space, I’m hoping to bring a fresh perspective and learnings from our work.

I’m delighted to join a fantastic panel, including our friends at Bethnal Green Ventures.

o   Simon Ruda, The Behavioural Insights Team (London)

o   Karsten Schmidt, iNudgeYou (Copenhagen)
o   Sarah Drummond, Snook (Glasgow)

o   Glen Mehn, Bethnal Green Ventures (London)

I’ll be focusing on:

How to create Safe Spaces to test public policy – What it means to set up failure experiments

How to use design thinking to open up public policy and create tangible outputs linked to policy

How to humanise public policy and make it accessible

How we can prototype public services and how design can support this

Looking at mindset and the characteristics, multiple disciplines and skills needed to operate in a progressive, agile process for policy and service development

From my background I’ll be pulling on the following experience:
Action research I undertook inside Skills Development Scotland to look at embedding design to deliver new public services in Scotland and digital channel shifts, and the link between policy and services on the ground
Prototyping the UK’s first online police feedback platform, MyPolice
Creating R+D labs inside Charities in Scotland to prototype new care services which we are currently working on
Working with Scottish Government on re-designing the learner journey for young people
Prototyping young people’s employability services with young people to create a youth led enterprise for publishing newspapers through The Matter
Developing eco-systems for how Open Glasgow and the City Council can enable citizens to co-produce services and be truely involved in delivery
CycleHack, a global movement I’ve set up with partners operating in 35 cities next year to reduce barriers to cycling through citizen engagement
Dearestscotland.com (recently featured in Scottish Parliament by opposing parties as a democratic method for developing crowdsourced policy)
And a reflection on the politics, actions and initiatives before, during and after the Scottish Referendum which will highlight some behavioural insights and use of social media to develop ideas and thinking and the consequential activism in commenting and participating in policy post indyref.
I’m looking forward to hearing the response of some of our thinking and work in Oman at the forum and seeing what we can learn to trial out in our backyard, Scotland.