It may come as no surprise

It’s been a rough old seven months or so. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that navigating a major organisational restructure is a walk in the park. And no matter how much you were expecting it, seeing your job title on the list of deleted posts comes as visceral punch.

I believe that I’ve done some great work at Local Government Improvement and Development (ex IDeA ). I’ve certainly worked with some amazing colleagues. But to be honest, I’ve been feeling itchy for some time. Wanting to do something different, but not so different. Yet the projects I was working on were hard to walk away from. For the past several years, I’ve been doing a lot with digital. I’ve been using it to support better governance and improved performance management. And as I used social media and worked with open data more, the more opportunities I could see for local public services. I’ve been blogging about it. Sharing examples. Taking the Local by Social events around the country. Helping practitioners to share information about social media and open data. I know the future is digital.

And yes, there was probably still much good I could have done at LG Group with that. But I’d been there for almost 8 years. It was time to go. And when I put in my form for voluntary redundancy, I slept better than I had in weeks.

But what to do next? Well…FutureGov were doing the kind of stuff I wanted to do. Digital at the core, but the focus was on people, innovation, improvement – radical improvement. Tech as a means but not an end. A firm belief in local democracy, representative, participative, collaborative. It seemed a natural fit. We started talking.

And so this morning I announced some very exciting news!

I think it’s going to be a fun ride.

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