Digital
The Civtech Alliance
September 1, 2020 by Stewart Hamilton 2 Comments | Category CivTech, Digital Scotland
Blog by Alexander Holt, Head of Strategic Partnerships, CivTech Alliance.
The CivTech Alliance is a newly-formed worldwide network of public, private and third sector organisations working across Civic and Gov tech sectors, supporting and developing products and services which make citizens’ lives better. This network acts as a peer-to-peer support network, hosting weekly video conference calls to share ideas, resources and support for programmes, with a Slack workspace for collaboration.
The CivTech Alliance was formed at CivTech®‘s Demo Day 4.0, which was held in March 2020, with over 500 leaders from public, private, third and academic sectors attending, and representatives from nearly 20 countries.
The focus for the group is currently on GovTech Week (7-11 September), a week-long event organised by the Lithuanian Ministry of Economy and Innovation. Topics covered will range from Climate Tech, modern public services, tech in policy making and Digital Democracy. A series of events will stream throughout the week.
On Tuesday 8th September as part of the ‘Rethinking public services’ day, Ben Macpherson, Minister for Public Finance and Migration has been invited to speak for a ‘Fireside chat’ on digital public services. This will be streamed on the day. The final day is the International Day with significant input from members of the CivTech Alliance and companies including Scottish companies Voxsio (with their mental health app for young people) and Reactec (with their wearable physical distancing technology).
The Alliance is ever growing and currently includes organisations from 16 countries, including; Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Dubai, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Scotland, The Netherlands, USA and Wales. It’s been great to see interdependent networks forming.
The CivTech Alliance members around the world have developed approaches to use technology in helping respond to Covid-19. From hackathons with over 1000 participants, to rapid development and deployment of solutions such as Poland’s Protego app, members have pivoted from their usual work to help their country and citizens at this time of crisis and much of this work has been shared internationally.
The group is a rich source of information – from technologies to policies, teams to networks – much of which is of benefit to the wider Directorate and organisation. The challenge definition session had presentations from CivVic Labs (Australia), GovTech Lab (Lithuania), Creators (Israel) as well as CivTech (Scotland).
Look out for more information coming soon and if you have any questions or would like more information please visit the CivTech Alliance website.
Tags: Alliance, CivTech, government, scottish
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Certainly very welcome – at the time of set up their team was dispersed due to Covid response (having wrapped up their third round), and the key point of contact was on paternity leave. We have the Innovate UK SBRI lead on our calls. But that’s a great prompt to follow up – thank you!
Alexander
No UK Government GovTech?