Prospect: Collective Intelligence
From Future of Local Services to the Public
Contents |
Summary
This theme reflects on the exercise of horizon scanning for this project itself, and highlights an opportunity to join up horizon scanning activity and related strategic analysis across communities, localities, regions, and even nations. This will call for a high level of initial activity to get a sufficient community established that can then be expanded and connected into other groups over time.
Definition
This project builds on previous futures work in order to enrich the knowledge base of the local government family and additionally provide a useful resource to support further shared horizon scanning across the sector – potentially setting up lines of communication and collaborative working across localities, regions, and sectors, even up to national-level government and beyond.
A great deal of local horizon scanning and strategy work is going on at a local level, including rich trend analysis, visioning exercises and in-depth scenarios work. This is conducted in a (but by no means limited to) the wiki which you are now using. Depending on the reaction of the sector and therefore demand, one opportunity would be to set up regular monitoring of innovations and wider developments in each of the Prospect areas defined on the wiki, as a focus for ongoing horizon scanning.
Regardless of this, if local authorities and their partners were to have shared resources for forward trend monitoring, filtering and analysis, this could feed directly into their strategic planning, helping to drive the shift towards the more innovative, anticipatory and exploratory local government culture.
Opportunities and Benefits
There are a number of opportunities and benefits that may arise from shared intelligence-gathering and futures work across Local Government:
- Reduced duplication and effort
- Identification and anticipation early signs of change
- Shared ideas and learnings, irrespective of party politics and geographic boundaries, for mutual benefit
- Creating spaces in which groups can meet to self-organise around common objectives and pool resources on key prospects, without excessive conditions and controls
- Provide evidence to central government of local innovation to attract further funding and investment
- Extend the community to share accounts of real service experiences, from both a provider and user perspective, to inform planning and delivery
- Create international networks to learn from other countries
- Unlock the talent, creativity of people across the sector and foster “bottom-up” scanning and innovation
- Involve the local public in the activity so that they can conduct an ongoing deliberation and feedback to local decision-makers, and provide a place for less formal models of consultation to be tried. After all, the public will be recipients, as well as paymasters of the next generation of public services
