The weather has got a lot colder this week. Phil has never liked the dark nights, he can’t wait for summer to come back. These past few weeks have been busy with GovCamp Cymru preparations. Work has been busy and very frustrating and challenging at times.

heledd’s selfie from the event

GovCamp Cymru 2024

Last Friday was GovCamp Cymru 2024. GovCamp Cymru is an unconference. It’s for people interested in improving public services, also known as an unconference. It’s the attendees who come up with the agenda of the day.

A lot of the digital team attended this event, it was so nice to see everyone in person and to have a proper catch-up.

Volunteering for GovCamp

By Philip Rookyard

After many, many months of preparation GovCamp Cymru arrived with a bang last Friday.

I attended GovCamp Cymru 2024 as a volunteer and a participant this year. I met some lovely, kind people, who are keen to improve public services for everyone.

Someone at the event said to me that they read our Weeknotes and admire our honesty and openness. So, this has been my inspiration for being more honest and open in our Weeknotes.

This year we only had a few core volunteers; Jo, Heledd, Mark and myself. We also had some lovely ‘camp makers’ (other volunteers), who helped us out on the day. We couldn’t have hosted this year’s GovCamp event without these wonderful volunteers. They gave up their time to make sure the event ran well.

Having so few volunteers in the core team was very challenging at times. We had to be in many places at once and we all had more than a few tasks to do.

According to those who attended, the day seemed to run ok. People seemed to like the event, felt energised and happy.

On the other hand, I felt like I had been beaten with a stick by the end of the day. Things didn’t go to plan from a volunteers perspective. We had many, many problems to fix throughout the day. I kept telling myself the event was a success and everyone was happy.

I’ve always been a perfectionist, it’s good at times but can be a massive hinderance. My mum always used to say “the reason you are always so stressed is you like everything perfect and life is not like that”. I suppose she was right.

As a participant I attended ‘10 years on…how can the community help Welsh Government do digital better’. There was a lot of frustration in the room. We talked about the lack of senior digital leaders in Government. People that know enough about digital to be able to help and improve things.

There is definitely a lot of frustration in the community.

Now this year’s event has been and gone the core team turn their attention to the 2025 event. I’ve already got plans for next year, how I can organise things even better and how we can improve the next event.

If you have any ideas on how we can improve next year’s GovCamp Cymru, please contact us and let us know.

If you didn’t come along to this year’s event and would like to attend next year, it will be lovely to see you.

This is the grid, the agenda for the day:

photo showing some of the post it note topics from gov camp

Ensuring our interaction and engagement with communities is meaningful

By Sophie Manners

Last week, some of our team attended GovCamp Cymru at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff, and we had a lovely time catching up with colleagues further afield in the Welsh Government space.

There were some very important discussions around public services, inclusivity, racism and tokenisation in the consultation space. The event attracted a variety of people from all walks of life, and this diversity of thought led to some interesting conversations around our work and the direction that public services must take to ensure they serve a greater number of community groups.

The sessions were facilitated by the attendees themselves, which made for a collaborative, open forum on many of the issues that affect us in our daily lives. We were also able to dive deeper into these learnings thanks to expert speakers and brave attendees who shared insights from their lived experiences.

A huge thank you to Phil for organising so much of the behind the scenes of the day for us, and Heledd and Jo for presenting throughout the day.

collage of the quiet room, the lunch, sophie’s selfie etc

Sophie got to chat with Shaheen at one of our favourite sessions, which hosted a conversation around privilege, ethics and meaningful interaction with the communities that are consulted on various issues within the sector. It was incredibly powerful to hear the lived experiences of others in the room, and we all left the session with a deeper understanding of the day-to-day racism that still plagues our industry and how it can deter individuals from consulting on issues that affect them.

The tokenisation of people from ‘hard-to-reach’ backgrounds was clear to see when reflecting on how organisations tend to reach out to under-represented communities for their feedback, while having little to no representation within their own organisations. True inclusion allows communities to help drive and steer the work in a meaningful way throughout the project.

Ensuring people can see themselves on the teams that consult them is a key step in meaningful interactions with all the different communities’ that Welsh public services represent. Simply outreaching to communities for their feedback – even in exchange for payment, is not genuine inclusion, and it’s important that we embed diversity at the heart of our teams and services, while also offering follow-up reports for consultees so they can see where their contributions have made a difference.

For further reading, we were recommended the book ‘White Fragility’ by Robin DiAngelo. While reading the book, it’s important to sit in the discomfort that you might feel as DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

After the sessions, we got together and shared our learnings and new insights over a delicious meal at the Duchess of Delhi who kindly hosted our evening meal. At the restaurant, the food and the staff were wonderful and the company Basis sponsored the drinks!

All in all, it was a great opportunity to network further and I think we all left feeling a lot more connected with those around us, as we have far more in common with one another than we perhaps realised.

photo from one of the sessions at the event

A new experience in networking

By Miki Miyata-Lee.

Last Friday, Maggie and I attended GovCamp Cymru 2024 event in Cardiff Bay. There, we experienced a new style of conference which was liberating. This year’s theme was ‘Reimagining Public Services’. There was no detailed agenda, and we made suggestions for what we want to talk about on the day.

We were there from 9am till 4pm and met so many new people as well as our NRW colleagues, which felt like we were reunited again! Popular topic was ethical use of AI, sustainability and well-being in public services. The energy in the event was great that was so easy to talk openly to people whom I never met.

Many thanks to Mark Sabine, Phil Rookyard and Sam Evans for supporting the great event. GovCamp Cymru was sponsored by Mark Drakeford this year.

Highly recommend.

selfie from attendees at the event

Page titles – how long is too long?

Well, definitely this one:

Regulatory Decision: SSSI management where the land did not enter the Habitat Wales Scheme 2024 but has entered the Habitat Wales Scheme 2025 and the owner/occupier wishes to manage the SSSI land in accordance with a NRW issued SSSI consent or land management agreement or WG issued management scheme which has been valid within the last five years, since 1 January 2020

Sam is working on it with SMEs (who, in turn, are working with legal). It’s an interesting challenge. Check future weeknotes for the outcome.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Phil’s blog went live: “Working with another organisation for a more joined-up service”
  • Sam, Kim and Phil had a pair writing session with Gruff from the translation team on the ‘submit and get a copy’ part of our forms. This is the latest section to be improved as part of our forms standardisation work
  • Sophie got chatting with some of the wonderful experts from Delib who manage the Citizen’s Space platform. We are in the process of setting up a call to discuss some of the feedback to help shape the tool and allow our team to do more with this great platform.