We’re delighted to announce the success of our application to the Local Digital Fund for an exemplar project looking into the use of chatbots and artificial intelligence to solve service design problems.

You can find full details of the issues we’re looking to cover, the way we’re intending to work and the deliverables we’re expecting to produce by looking at our full application.

Partners involved

There are 12 councils in total working on the project;

• Oxford City Council
• Hertsmere Borough Council
• Cheltenham Borough Council
• Doncaster Council
• Preston City Council
• North East Derbyshire District Council
• Bolsover District Council
• Calderdale Council
• Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council
• Bromsgrove District Council
• Redditch Borough Council
• Surrey County Council
• Adur and Worthing Councils

You can read more about how we got to this point by reading my blog post on the application process.

How we want to work

In putting together our application we’ve given a commitment to working in the open and sharing what we’re working on, as part of meeting the spirit on the Local Digital Declaration

You’ll be seeing regular blog posts here as we progress, and the outcomes of the work available as they are delivered.

The intention is that the work we do belongs to local government as a sector and not just the councils involved. We came together as a set of councils as we shared a problem that we knew would be better solved if we did it as one rather than individually.

First Steps

We’ve got an incredibly tight timescale to get everything we want delivered to meet out commitment in the application.

Today we will be doing two things;

1. Starting our procurement through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework to identify a great digital agency to work with us
2. Posting the project on Pipeline to let everyone know about the project