Cumbria’s Digital Team are blogging!

Well after seeking advice from the good folks of #localgovdigital twitter, welcome to the Cumbria Digital Team’s first blogpost!

Some of you may have seen our recent tweet about needing a leg up to get us started:

The overwhelming response to that tweet was just to start so here we are.

It may have taken us a while to get going but we’re trying to do more to work in the open and share our experiences here in Cumbria and we hope that people will find it interesting or hopefully even useful! (And special thanks to the marvellous Dave Briggs for helping us to make a start, and for the fantastic idea to create a place for local gov digital blogs – we’re honoured to be the first to use it.)

By way of a quick introduction to the team:

The Cumbria Digital team has been in existence since 2015.  Starting with a really small team of 3 people on temporary contracts, we’ve now grown to a team of 16 including (still quite small) teams for service design, the website, intelligent automation and wedding ceremonies (not an obvious fit we know, but we’ll tell you all about that in another blogpost…).

As a team, we are passionate about adopting user-centred design principles, challenging the status quo and working more flexibly and collaboratively with service areas – but we know that we have a lot still to learn and we’re always looking for new ideas to help us.

We’ve had some significant successes as a team, but it’s not been without its challenges.  We’ve learnt a lot from looking outside our council, and reading other team blogs and talking to other councils  – there’s some fantastic work being done in the local gov digital world and thanks to everyone who has been willing to give up their time to talk to us and share their knowledge and experiences.

We hope that our experiences here in Cumbria can help other teams who are possibly facing similar challenges around budgets and organisational culture and we’re keen to keep collaborating with and learning from other people, so please get in touch!

3 Comments

  1. Hi
    Thanks for the blog – can you link me into future blogs so that I can stay in touch and potentially share some of the things that we are doing in West Lothian

    Karen

    • Hi Karen,
      Sure! Until email subscriptions are set up we’ll promote new blog posts across Twitter and Linked in too. Look out for myself @CraigJBarker, Kate @KateHurr and @CDigitalteam.

      We’d love to hear about what you are working on, Dave is your man to get up and running sharing stories on here 🙂

      Craig

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