Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: The City, the Baba podcast where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlin Shimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the City is brought to you by Babel Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the Babel platform at babel-smartcities eu.
So welcome to this episode recorded live at the Smart City Expo World Congress here in beautiful Barcelona. And it's part of our media partnership with Fira. Barcelona. First off, I have to give a huge, huge thank you to FIRA for having us here. The wonderful partnership. Partnership. It's also been already such a crazy, fruitful time here. It's just always the busiest, most insane week with so much knowledge exchange and learning and talking and meeting new people. So it's always a fabulous week.
So I'm. I'm having a wonderful but very tiring time and I think our guests have the same experience as well. So without further ado, I'd love to welcome our guests today. Today, all the way here from London, I have Eddie Copeland, the director of the London Office of Technology and Innovation, otherwise known as Lottie.
Welcome, Eddie.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Nice to be here. Thanks for having us.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Absolutely.
And with him is his lovely colleague Ginta Hajri, the Digital innovation delivery lead at the London Office of Technology and Innovation. Lottie, again, welcome, Ginta.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Thank you. Nice to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. I'm really excited to learn more about your work. I've seen you around like Lottie, popping up in different places, and I'm really excited to get to know your work and what your goals are and a lot more about your organization and all that good stuff. I like to start off with a little bit of a teaser question to get running and going.
The question I have for you today is can you describe what you think London's digital future looks like in just three words? And you can build off of each other if you'd like.
Eddie, you want to go first?
[00:02:29] Speaker C: I'll give you the first two.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: So collaborative, innovative and Londoner focused.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: Oh, that was if you allow hyphenated. I think Londoner focused is valid, right?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Invalid. I allow it. I allow it.
Hyphenation is always allowed.
So. Okay, good. Do you want to explain why you chose those?
[00:02:51] Speaker C: Actually well, so collaboration, we have to mention, this is the heart of what Lottie does. We help the London boroughs, the Mayor of London, the Greater London Authority, which is kind of London's big strategic authority.
We, the, we joke. We're the professional cat herders of that local government community. So it's all about collaboration. Innovation is the eye of Lottie and London of focus again.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Well, if nothing we do is London focused, it's not going to work. It's just simple as that.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So having the, the people at the heart, the people that live and work and play in London at the heart of what you do, I, I want to get into that a lot more, but I first want to learn more about who you both are as people. What led you into your role today?
G. Do you want to start?
Yeah.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: I actually started my career in London's local government, in the front line, as it were. But what struck me there, I led lots of change programs across urban planning and economic development. But as the years went by, what struck me was that London, although it's one city, it consists of 33 separate, quite independent administrative areas, all kind of doing their own thing and taking their own individual approaches in solving what are common London citywide problems.
Yeah. And what, what attracted me to Lottie was our mission of on collaboration and solving issues once for our city.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds good. Sounds like an interesting journey that led you to where you're supposed to be today, Eddie. Similar journey, different background. Tell me about you.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: I've done a series of mostly unrelated things that I can try and justify in retrospect, but the relevant background is about 14 years ago I was working for a think tank and I was looking around the world at like, interesting examples of Ware has used tech data innovation in interesting ways. And I stumbled on the example of the Mayor's Office of Data analytics in New York City. Shout out to Mike Flowers, the founder of that, if he's listening.
And I was inspired by that example of like, how do you join up data in their case, across New York? And I was going, why aren't we doing that in London? So I wrote some reports about that. I later moved to the innovation foundation Nestor, where we did lots of different government innovation things. But one of the things we did was a pilot across London trying to join up London's data across 12 boroughs at the time. And eventually that was part of the genesis of what we now do at Lottie, which is collaboration on data, on tech, on digital, on broader innovation. So when the job for Lottie came up, it's like, I can't not go for that, having been so banging the drum for collaboration for so long. So, yeah, it's been a nice journey. Getting closer and closer to that cold face.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: What's.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: What's one of the irrelevant things that.
[00:05:51] Speaker C: I used to be a fundraiser for a school in Cambridge. I've worked as a prison volunteer.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Well.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: And I had an ill fated startup trying to create apps for commuters which failed terribly due to my own incompetence as well as market circumstances.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: I, I love it.
I want to dig a bit more into Lottie now because we've hinted at it, a big collaboration piece. We know it's bringing people together, bringing the boroughs together in London. Right.
What.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: I guess.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Eddie, I'll start with you.
For listeners outside of London, they've never heard of it before. Can you give us the headline, the mission in. In one line or couple sentences?
[00:06:37] Speaker C: It's basically, how do we help London boroughs use innovation, data technology to improve their services, be really high performing organizations and tackle big problems for Londoners? And the key word together, it's how do we, rather than doing it, As G said 33 separate ways, these are common challenges.
We're the people who bring the conversation together. What can we do collectively? Where does collaboration add value?
[00:07:04] Speaker B: And maybe you guys can both add to this as well. So how is the next natural question. Right, so a lot of organizations, okay, you bring people together. How do you make sure that it's effective collaboration?
[00:07:20] Speaker C: Shall I start? And then, I mean, essentially a lot of it is just bringing the people together to have the conversation. And our team, we're a team of 10 at this point. Listening, listening, listening. Where have they got common challenges, where they're common opportunities, things they're likely to work on? Obviously lots of people right now talking about AI or use of Internet of things technologies. And I think we're brokering that conversation about what can we do better together? And it's kind of in four buckets. Like, can we share knowledge between them rather than all of them going out and finding answers?
What do they all know already? Let's share that great wisdom. Can we build capacity together? It's really difficult in the public sector to recruit the digital, tech and data talent we need.
Where can we share some of that resource? We run lots of shared experiments. So let's try something new, whether it's areas in like service design that Genta leads on or on cyber security.
And then the final bit is where can we speak with one voice rather than, you know, borrowers Hitting off in different directions. If we need to say to government or to the tech sector or to universities, we need this change or we need this help.
So much more compelling. If we can ask once on behalf of.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah, unified voice there. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense too. We actually, as Babel, do a lot with our facilitation hat on. We do a similar thing, but European wide as well. And we've seen a lot, a lot of so many lessons where you people say, ah, you're doing that. I wanted to try that too. Or what did. I didn't know that you were doing that. So there's still. Even in this digital age, there's so many gaps still. Right.
It's kind of hard to believe that we still actually, with. With everything, with all the tools we have, we still really need these organizations like yourself, bring everyone together.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: It's true. And I think if you look in most cities, I mean, London is particularly fragmented, as Ghenta said, we've got 32 boroughs, the city of London, plus the mayor's office, all kind of autonomous organizations.
None of their team structures, ways of working are naturally designed for collaboration. So certainly in London, and I think this is true of other cities, you need that collaborative layer to take the hassle out of it. Otherwise, collaboration just feels overwhelming, exhausting, tiring. We're there to make it easy, frictionless and fun hopefully as well.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: That's good when one of your missions is to make it fun, collaboration.
[00:09:42] Speaker C: Well, your listeners can't see Gentra and I are sitting in these very vibrant, very vibrant jumpers. Our slides match this. So wherever giving a presentation, we're just like a floating head against this very pink backdrop. But it's meant to be fun and energizing and we design that into a lot of our work.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think one thing I'd add is that it needs to be someone's job, and in this case, it happens to be our job. But actually you do need that resource and capacity. Who's thinking day in, day out about bringing the different bits of the system together.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
I want to now understand a little bit more, dive a bit deeper into some of the programs and things like that that you're involved in. I understand, Gita, that you are involved in this Get Online London program, and I'm curious to learn more about what that actually is and what it does.
So, yeah, please enlighten us.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. So Get Online London is London's digital inclusion service.
We set it up about three and a half years ago with support from the Mayor of London. And what it actually does is to deliver holistic package of support to Londoners where they are. So that package of support consists of a laptop, a tablet, smartphone, but also connectivity, so SIM cards and not forgetting skills and the ongoing support that Londoners need to be able to effectively engage with the online world.
And what I'd say that what's special about this service is that it hasn't invented a new thing or created a new thing as such. It's actually a strength based initiative. So it's supporting existing, existing infrastructure, community, local organizations that can support Londoners in a way, in a very specific way because these are organizations that are already trusted and have relationships with Londoners in the different, in the vast kind of geography of London. So what we've actually found is that through this program we are not only providing this vital support and access to the online world, but actually we are building that confidence and trust in our citizens, in our residents about the online world. Because we know that there is a lot of misinformation out there and certainly around the safety and security of being online.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, really interesting. How long has the program been running for?
[00:12:10] Speaker A: I think just over three years, three and a half years.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: And the feedback has been very positive.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Positive.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: What have you learned from it?
[00:12:18] Speaker A: We've learned so much from it, certainly around this issue of trust and actually engaging with people where they are. And sometimes what we found is that digital exclusion is one aspect of the barriers they face in their lives. And you know, people might feel might have barriers around kind of employability or training. You know, English might be their second language.
So it's engaging people where they are and supporting them with, with in a holistic way. It might be housing, it might be employment, as I said, it might be an array of things. So it's about engage, meeting people where they are. Absolutely.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: I'm curious about the collaboration piece with this as well, because it was this, this was done in collaboration with the boroughs, correct? Or like how did that piece work?
[00:13:11] Speaker A: It's a citywide initiative and this is why I think it's really, really special. And I think partly not to cut this bit out, this is why I think it's really special.
It brings together the private sector telecommunication providers who are providing us with the SIM cards to deliver to Londoners. It brings together the public sector, so the boroughs, the NHS as well actually and health partners are involved in this. But it also brings together kind of the Mayor of London office and other institution corporate organizations who donate devices to be reused and repurposed by Londoners. So it's the only initiative, I think, of its kind I've certainly come across in the UK that is doing this such a collaborative and engaging way.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Okay, cool. No, I'm really interested to learn more. I think I could talk to you about it for a while, but we'll move on.
I'm wondering about data sharing, actually. This is a topic that's come up in so many of my different conversations over this last couple days as well.
So when services really span multiple boroughs, where have you seen data sharing make the clearest difference for the people? We were just talking about inclusion.
Where do you see this making the biggest difference?
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Eddie, you want to say.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: Well then, just to give your listeners a bit of context, before Lottie was set up, London on any given issue at a data level was kind of like a 33 piece jigsaw puzzle where every borough's got their little bit, but literally no one could put those pieces together. Take a step back and see what the big picture shows. And you think big issues like climate change, flooding, congestion, poverty, whatever it is, these issues have no respect for borough boundaries. People live their lives crossing these invisible borough borders. So the data needs to follow them so that we can, we can respond in a much more joined up way. So to your question, two really meaningful projects that help vulnerable people. One is on rough sleeping. For the first time ever, about 18 months ago, we joined up data on rough sleeping. So homelessness on the streets across all of the London boroughs and eight of the largest homelessness charities working in the capital so that we start to understand where did people first ask for help? Have they come out of emergency accommodation in one borough, but now they're on the street in another borough? That joint visibility.
What we now want to do is make sure we can use that data foundation to try and design more preventative services. Let's reach people before they end up in that situation of crisis. And then a second one. The Mayor of London has been very passionate about ensuring children can get free school meals. So if you're from a family background that would struggle to make sure you know you're well fed, we know that's very, very important.
By quirk of the way, we have local government, this very fragmented 33 boroughs. If your child goes to school outside of your home borough, the school won't know the family circumstances. So there's children who would qualify for free school meals if they went to school next door who were missing out. So we've been doing this pilot with four boroughs making sure, we can share that data in a responsible, ethical, secure way. With just four boroughs, we've managed to auto enroll 300 children who were missing out on free school meals. Now they're also enrolled and we want to expand this as rapidly as we can across the rest of the city.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: What are the challenges that you see when expanding this? Because we talk a lot about, you know, at a small scale you can implement things rather well. I'm sure you had challenges also with those four, but now when you expand it, what challenges are you facing?
[00:17:07] Speaker C: Well, thankfully we've overcome one of the biggest challenges which we can now apply to everything, including these projects. And that is the seemingly not the most exciting topic, but it's the vital one, which is information governance. So the legal aspect of getting all these organizations to agree to share data about three or so years ago, we hired the first ever Pan London information governance lead, who now works with the information governance leads, those data protection experts across all the municipalities.
And we've now got this relationship where what used to take two years, maybe 10 years in extreme circumstances to get borrowers to agree to share data, we can now do in a matter of weeks. So if you've got that trusted legal framework and confidence, we're doing the right thing ethically and securely, we then find it so much easier to join up, including quite sensitive data sets like the ones I've mentioned on homelessness and obviously quite vulnerable children.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah, amazing. I really love these, love these projects where you're bringing, bringing that across.
I'm also wondering a little bit about AI. Are you tired of talking about AI yet being here?
[00:18:19] Speaker C: But we're ready for more.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Ready, ready for more AI. Let's go.
I don't think it's out of our lives yet, so I think we have to keep talking about it.
So Ginta, I understand that you're possibly working on some AI topics as well. With the work that you do when you're doing the delivery, where do you see AI improving decisions or workflows without losing human accountability?
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Well, I agree with you that actually AI is here for a while, it's here to stay. So we better talk about it and think about best ways to use it to improve services.
One common use case we've come across in London is the use of AI in social care, where social workers are using transcription tools to summarize meetings they have with residents that they careful.
So the AI will not only transcribe but also summarize the key actions arising or the key actions that the social worker needs to take away and respond to the care package for this particular individual or household.
And this is really good for the social worker because it's by the AI taking the pressure off the administration type of work, the social worker has more time to deeply connect or connect more deeply with the individual or the household that they care for, to kind of find out the root cause of issues and therefore address them more effectively and in a better way. What I like about this use case is that the accountability of the social worker is still there. The AI will help the social worker to come up with the key things they need to take away, but it still leaves room for the social worker to apply their professional judgment and experience and expertise to actually assess, you know, is what the AI suggested, the right course of action for this particular individual or household. So that's where that comes in. And I love that about this particular way of using AI. Yeah.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: I was in Dubai last week and one of the startups there was talking about a similar use case. It might be the same company, I don't know.
But I also had the thought then, of course there's tons of risks when you talk about using AI, right. And when you're talking about deploying AI in these situations, it can kind of, I think you, you, you said it very clearly, right, that you still make your own judgment. But I also want to ask you what you think that the risks still are that exist in these types of use cases when implementing AI. I don't know if either of you have any thoughts there. What we have to be careful of, basically.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: There's so many. The list is long. I've just written a blog this week about this very topic. But I think one key thing to bear in mind is the misinterpretation.
And this is where the professional judgment comes in. You know, AI can very easily misinterpret words, particularly in very complex type of work like social care, but even healthcare as well. And I'm sure it applies in many different contexts. So having that professional judgment and having that human. We say human in the lead, but I've come across the human in the loop concept as well.
It's crucial, it's actually vital that we have an individual who makes the final decision, particularly when it comes to things like health care outcomes or benefits as well, Social Security benefits, things that can really impact people adversely if cotton wrong.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so many interesting use cases that we see upstairs. Right. For. For AI. And I just always want us to be mindful of always mentioning, okay, this is the risk. I love the human in the loop, human in the lead concepts as well.
Have you seen any negative response from citizens around AI when you're doing these projects as well? I'm just, I've heard a lot of cities talking today about some.
Yeah, some people didn't like the AI projects, things along those lines. What has your experience been?
[00:22:40] Speaker C: I think what we really commend our community of boroughs for doing is I think they're taking the right approach to avoid that by starting small, testing things in a very risk controlled way before rolling out. And obviously as part of the Lottie community, they're sharing with each other. Well, this worked well. This watch really one, this one isn't worth that effort. And they're also talking with each other. Okay, what's our AI policy? How are we engaging residents? We've got this thriving community of practice of AI practitioners who are actually on the ground trying these tools and they're actively sharing stories with each other about. Okay, this is how we engage our residents in a conversation about it.
A lot of our boroughs have been very active with our support, looking at things like data ethics for many, many years. And actually a lot of the, the questions around should you do it just because you legally can do it? Also apply to AI. So I think we're familiar with that concept. We've got boroughs who are setting up AI ethics committees where they're bringing in external expertise to go. Well, let's think through the unintended consequences.
And also it's early days. So for example, the use case that Genta has mentioned with social workers, we also need to look at this a year from now, two years from now actually, what's the impact on social workers?
What's the long term kind of impact on their profession, their experience?
And I think a lot of this is unknowable. But starting small, testing, trying things in a risk controlled way so far I think is avoiding the car crash stories one could imagine happening. And I think I'd urge all city governments to be really thoughtful, really careful and really think hard. How can you engage your residents in a meaningful conversation? Because if you freak them out, you won't be able to touch any of it, including the positive stuff. So it's got to be done responsibly.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Absolutely. The other thing I think I hear people say sometimes is, oh, these are like nice to have type things like, why does a social care worker need AI? What's wrong with, you know, like fix the basics, essentially. What would you say to people that say fix the Basics first and then we can layer some fancy stuff on top.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Well, I think that they're spot on and that is exactly what we've done. So I guess when we're, we're going around a conference like this one and people talk about that, there's a risk you get sucked into the. This is the shiny AI suppress release version. It sounds wonderful. We know full well that under the hood, for AI to do anything, useful things need to be true about your existing technology and city governments delivering hundreds of services, lots of old legacy technologies. If you don't have basic things like data access via things like APIs, often you can't get the AI to do things if your data quality is terrible. AI is just going to help you make faster, worse decisions.
And also, you know, you can have the most powerful AI in the world if it's bolted on just to the same service model and way of working you've had for 20 years.
To be blunt, you can't expect profound change. You've got to think about people, tech, data and your processes holistically.
So, Lottie, we've done a lot on, as we mentioned, information governance. We talk a lot about technology standards, we talk about the cyber security. We've helped borrowers with data quality. We do a lot on service design, helping them think more imaginative. What are you going to change on the ground if you have this AI? Don't expect that you can just procure something and suddenly we have huge public sector reform. It doesn't work like that. So we do it. And I think that message is often getting lost with people who just get caught up in the AI hype and they need to understand that.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Exactly. I like the way that you think about this. I think it's really meaningful to, to always mention this.
So you're doing a lot of amazing things.
You've, you've talked about some of the products. I'm sure you're doing a lot more than what we've gotten the chance to cover right now.
Next Episode 2 Next Next series don't worry.
What is still kind of the main challenge that you're looking to tackle as Lottie.
[00:26:45] Speaker C: Shall I go in with one? So I'll start us off with.
So in public sector reform, there's kind of two buckets of things you need to do. There are things that you've got to do to make sure you balance this year's budget.
There's a separate set of things you've got to do in parallel that starts right now that ensures you have effective, financially sustainable Service models that exist three years, five years plus into the future, where a lot more creativity is needed. And certainly in a UK setting. Some of our public services are coming under such huge pressure right now. It's not enough just to add a bit of AI or to improve the data sharing or add a new tool here and there. We need to fundamentally rethink some of our service models. And Ghent has been leading some of our work to reimagine in social care.
So I think we're really keen to bring our community on that journey of going, let's think more radically together about how we reimagine the way we care for the elderly, tackle climate change, prevent homelessness.
We engage a lot with our service colleagues across London to help them think about that. So much more we could do. And keen to spend a lot more time there.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. What do you think is your constraint? Is it capacity? Is it time?
Just always curious to understand how organizations like you kind of can have more impact with limited resources yourself, I imagine.
[00:28:05] Speaker C: I think the constraint is. Well, number one, it's that budget pressure. So the challenge is a lot of public sector reform or city innovation projects get judged by the criteria of unless it saves us money this financial year. It's just a distraction, I guess, going to. Also the headspace and the ability of services to spend time with us, we found challenging from time to time.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Creating that dedicated space and time for local government or for public sector officers to actually have the freedom to explore these more innovative and actually different ways of thinking and solving problems collectively, together.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
I also want to mention, we try, we've tried in the last few episodes to have a question always for our private sector listeners, because I think we, we have a lot of public sector listeners and they always take a lot of learnings from everything everybody says. But I also want to add a little bit of knowledge in there from your perspective, for the innovation companies that are looking to innovate in London, for example, what. What would you want them to do to be effective partners of the boroughs?
[00:29:21] Speaker A: You might have heard this one before, but what I would say is that better partnerships between the public and private sector are the key to kind of to solving the conundrum that you're talking about.
We've been working with London boroughs for the past six and a half years now, and we hear quite often that London boroughs are feeling frustrated that the products are often not meeting the needs of their residents or the needs of their staff. But on the other side of the argument, we are also hearing from suppliers that they are not getting enough airtime with the boroughs so they can better understand their problems. And in our sandbox approach, we run this process called the sandbox in adult social care. And what we tried to do was to create this space, time and environment for the public sector to come together with the suppliers so that they can each kind of collaborate and understand problems more. So they also can contribute, can contribute to that service or product or technology development.
And what was different to any other initiative out there, I think, is that we used immersive theater to bring to. Yeah, to bring to the surface some of the problems.
You know, it's quite different, isn't it, having actors acting out. The journey of an individual going through the whole health and care system.
And the feedback afterwards was that from supplies as well, actually, was that.
It was quite different, actually. Hearing. And what we came across was lots of people said, oh, yes, my mum or my auntie or someone in my family went through this. So it was like that notion of, oh, yeah, this is real. I see that now and I see that how it plays out in someone's whole life, not just the local government bit or the technology bit.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: The storytelling piece is so essential with how. I mean, a big part of what you do is communication. Right. And the storytelling piece, I can see you really captured within this immersive theater. So it's a good. It's a good idea for others, I think, to take away with this as well. Maybe not applicable to every situation. Not that we want to do theater for every.
I'd like to see some funny applications of this, actually, in different ways, but.
[00:31:47] Speaker C: Well, we were chatting to. If you want to check out the Smart Dublin team, shout out to them. They've been using a similar approach we heard in cybersecurity. You know, if you, all of your listeners, no doubt, work in organizations, you get the email from the IT department saying, look out for X, Y and Z.
But apparently they've been doing immersive theater to bring to life on it. This is the human impact you're going to find if you have a phishing attack, etc. So it's. It sparked our thoughts. Okay, actually, where else can we use that?
Connect with people emotionally connect with the human story and then the business case and the role of tech and suppliers connects with the story rather than us just pitching at each other, which doesn't seem to work.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I work with Smart Dublin quite closely. I actually just came from a meeting with them.
So, yeah, shout out to them as well. We did a Whole podcast series. Actually, when we first started the podcast, we did a whole podcast series with Smart Dublin. So you can go back back into the early days of the podcast a few years ago and you can listen to all podcast guests from Smart Dublin as well. So.
Yeah, sounds good.
Yeah. Really interesting approach. I love hearing about these types of things.
So we. We talked about some interesting lessons. I think already that some cities that are listening can take from what you're doing. What do you think are those key lessons there that we haven't maybe yet talked about, or maybe that we've touched on, but you want to expand on? What can other cities really take away from what you've been doing?
[00:33:19] Speaker C: So the number one thing that Lottie stands for is the power of collaboration.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: And I think for any city around the world, no matter your city structure, a lot of them will have, you know, multiple municipalities that sum up to cover, certainly larger cities.
Your problems are shared.
Your residents want to be residents of the city, not just of their local area. They want stuff to work and join up and live and work out in that whole environment, including for more rural regions as well. And so I think we're real advocates. How do you create that model where collaboration becomes seamless and easy? And indeed, what you're doing with the podcast, let's share internationally as well. That's why we're here at the Smart City Expo. We're keen to go around all those city stands. What are you working on? What are your case studies? Can we visit you? Can we share? And I think we're all in this together.
Cities share so many of these challenges. The collaboration bit is really key to serving our residents well.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: And I'd add, actually, collaboration is really hard. You know, certainly in London, I know London is not unique, but in London, we have this issue with legacy systems, which effectively means systems don't talk to each other and the data follows suit as well. But what I'd say is, whilst it's really hard, it's actually worth it, because when you get to the end of it and you see good outcomes for your residence, which is what matters and why we work in the public sector, you just know it's worth it.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Very good words to end us on for the main interview part. Now we go into our segment.
Our segment is called Flip the Script.
Flip the Script.
You are the one asking the questions and I'll be the one answering them.
Sarah, do you have a question in mind for each other?
[00:35:11] Speaker A: I have one for you.
[00:35:12] Speaker C: Oh, go for it.
No pressure, Eddie.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: So Having worked at Lottie or you know, led Lottie for the past six and a half years, what would you do differently in hindsight? Good question.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: See best questions.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: That's a really good question.
Says. But part of me is thinking, well, with retrospect, you know, you can re engineer everything. Two things.
I think I was naive when we first started Lottie, we're mentioning to some other cities earlier we tried to run it and this was my fault, trying to run it like a bit like an open democracy. Like anyone suggests an idea, we'll do sticky dot voting on the most popular and we'll just go for those. And I think whilst the ideas might have been theoretically popular, they were kind of strategically incoherent and it took us a little while, certainly myself, to learn that. Actually at Lottie we think pan London all day, every day our boroughs are thinking about their area because their structure, their incentives and their remit is that local perspective. And so it took us a while to realize actually we need to just listen, listen, listen to their collective needs and then play back to them. Did you realize half of you were all complaining about this issue? Should we do something on that? And I think sort of leading them more on that.
The second bit I think is just on that data sharing piece, we knew that there were some cultural barriers, there was technology barriers, there was demand barriers around joining up data across London.
But I think the key to really unlocking it was again, people treat this as an afterthought. It's about information governance and actually if you get the trusted legal framework, then actually that's unlocked a lot of our ability to join up data much, much faster.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Good question and good answer. Do you have a question also?
[00:37:04] Speaker C: So you have led our work on some of our biggest thematic areas in social care, digital exclusion.
Of all the issues that you think London could benefit from this of service design driven approach, which areas do you think would benefit, would most want to. Would most benefit from that approach next time around?
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Tough question because I think there's London again is not unique to this, to having, you know, some big, big issues. But maybe climate change and homelessness. There you go, get two for one.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:37:44] Speaker C: And that's great. Actually it's a really interesting one because on climate change and homelessness, I think a lot of our colleagues in London are very much asking us for support on the data role of that. But we all know that data unlocks a certain amount of knowledge. But then it's what do you do with it? What do you translate it into and that service design, sharing the stories actually would be really, really powerful.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Yeah, good, good question. See you. You do a better job than anyone else in asking the questions. I sometimes I feel like I should just leave.
So it's the final question though. It's a question we ask every single guest.
We're here at a smart city Expo and I want to hear from you, to you. What is a smart city though actually.
[00:38:28] Speaker C: Am I starting? Am I settling?
So I think the way I'd phrase it is the smart part of a smart city should not be the technology.
It's people's ability to use a all the tools at their disposal to solve issues that actually matter to residents.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Very well put.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: You want to add to that? Yeah, mine's quite similar actually. And my definition of a smart city is a city that responds to people's changing needs.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: I love it. Very adaptable then, right? Adaptability, yeah, we love both of those definitions. As you can imagine. I get all kinds of different answers and I really think, think we are evolving also to go away from just tech focused answers and into a more human centric approach to what a smart city is. And I think your answers also reflect that very well. So with that I just have to give you a big thank you for spending your valuable time. There's limited time here at the Smart City Expo, lots going on. So thank you for dedicating a bit of your time to talking to me and talking to all of our listeners. So thank you very much for coming on.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for having us.
[00:39:39] Speaker B: Absolutely, my pleasure as well. And of course to all of our listeners, I have to give them a big thank you for listening all the way through the end as well with this attention span issue that we have. That's quite a feat as well to make it all the way to the end and also to our listeners. Don't forget, you can find out more about smart city projects and other use cases solutions on the free Babel platform at Babel Smart City Cities.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Eu.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
