Brum together: Reflections on Delib’s October 2024 User Group

by Harry Daniel and Ian Macbeth

Back in 2014, we at Delib had an idea. We were constantly being surprised and inspired by the organisations we worked with – but if we were learning so much from our customers, how much more might our customers benefit from talking to each other? We hosted an event in Birmingham, the UK’s second city, featuring presentations from customers sharing their Citizen Space ideas and experiences, and from Delib staff explaining a bit more about the company. It was a simple idea – but it was a huge success, and the Delib User Group was born. 

Since then, we have hosted User Groups in (among other places) Belfast, Edinburgh, London, Brisbane, and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, online. Last month, almost exactly ten years since that first meet-up, we returned to Birmingham for another highly successful day of presentations and networking. 

The day began with Delib’s Chief Operating Officer, Louise Cato. Louise was at that first ever Delib User Group in 2014, and while she did reminisce briefly, the future was very much the theme of Louise’s presentation. Louise previewed some exciting new Citizen Space features that are in development, including a couple of game-changing new Geospatial features (watch this space for more info!), and our new-look Workspaces. Louise also spoke about some of the customers that are currently trialling our new API capability to enhance their Citizen Space sites in various ways. 

Following Louise were Sean Marks and Chris Final, from Essex County Council. Sean and Chris gave a very informative, insightful and – it would turn out – incredibly timely presentation about ECC’s recent Local Nature Recovery Strategy consultation. Sean and Chris were very candid about the challenges they faced in delivering this consultation. They were equally effusive in their praise for Citizen Space and their Delib Customer Success Manager, Jessie, who worked closely with them throughout the process. 

Sean and Chris also gave some fascinating insights into their consultation processes at Essex – including the fact that they demo Citizen Space for every newly elected councillor, thereby ensuring the kind of senior-level buy-in that enables them to plan, develop and deliver innovative and sophisticated consultations like their Local Nature Recovery Strategy. 

Overall, everyone at Essex was thrilled with the outcome of their activity. Both the quantity and, crucially, the quality of the response data was very high – and the activity even made the BBC news! Sean and Chris’s generosity in sharing their experience and the lessons they learned was hugely appreciated by the other customers present on the day – many of whom are preparing their own Local Nature Recovery Strategy consultations, resulting in an enthusiastic and involved Q&A discussion.

Next up was Kate McCullough from the Northern Ireland Assembly, who gave us a brief history of the assembly and compared its traditional, analogue approaches to engagement with the transformation that occurred when the Assembly adopted Citizen Space – which Kate described more than once as a ‘godsend’! Kate spoke about how Citizen Space enables the Assembly to engage with Northern Ireland’s seldom-heard and difficult-to-reach communities, citing the example of the Assembly’s Older People’s Parliament and how Citizen Space was used to broaden participation and inform the debates held in that forum. 

Kate’s observations on the benefits and perils of centralised team structures versus more distributed approaches to working on Citizen Space sparked a very interesting discussion among the group and it was a theme that would recur throughout the day. Kate was every bit as funny and engaging as those of us from Delib who have had the pleasure of working with her knew she would be!

Delib’s own Tiffany Maddox had the unenviable job of following Kate, but if anyone at Delib is equal to that challenge it’s our Tiff. Tiff presented on Delib’s first Impact Report. This is Delib doing what we encourage our customers to do by ‘closing the feedback loop’ and reporting back on the real-world impact made by all our customers’ hard work on Citizen Space. Tiff broke down some of the stats and the criteria she used to measure impact and success, and this led to a very lively and revealing group discussion about how the organisations in attendance measure success internally. Tiff also won the prize for most visual puns in her slide deck. (Seriously, the slides were a treat; check them out here.)

After lunch, we heard from Ellen Taplin from Surrey County Council. In her previous job, Ellen worked extensively on Citizen Space at the London Boroughs of Richmond and Wandsworth, and she spoke about transferring her learning from those councils to her new role in Surrey’s research and intelligence unit. Ellen spoke about how Citizen Space is helping her to streamline the council’s internal processes and to standardise the quality of the consultations published. Ellen also spoke about how all of the research and intelligence unit’s work is underpinned by the Gunning’s principles, which, as Louise Cato pointed out in the Q&A, were also the foundation for the original development of Citizen Space.

While Ellen from Surrey and Kate from the Northern Ireland Assembly touched on some of the challenges of consulting with relatively large populations (1.2 million people and 1.9 million respectively), the User Group next heard from Martin Guest and Catherine Murrell from Melton Borough Council, the fourth smallest local authority by population in England. Melton adopted Citizen Space just over a year ago, but, as Martin and Catherine detailed in their presentation, they have certainly been busy in the last 12 months.  

First they had the council’s corporate plan to consult on, followed swiftly by the local plan. And, if that wasn’t enough, they also had to consult on their climate emergency strategy. Delivering any one of these highly consequential consultations in a single year would have been a major undertaking for any local authority, and, as Martin frankly put it, if it hadn’t been for Citizen Space and all the support they received from their Delib Customer Success Manager, Natalie, he and his team would have been up the proverbial creek! 

To close the day, we heard from Matt Sital-Singh, one of Delib’s brilliant and tireless software engineers. Matt give us an illuminating and very funny insight into what life as a software engineer is really like (disappointingly less like The Matrix than people often assume), as well as a sneak preview of how Workspaces would be replacing Departments in Citizen Space’s internal structure. This information is in the public domain now and you can read all about it here. If you have any questions about it ahead of the launch later this month, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager. And if you want to be among the first to know about the new developments our engineering team are always working on, be sure to book your place at our next User Group. We plan to host it in the spring and we’ll be posting details about it in the new year. See you there! 

Thanks to all our fabulous guest speakers and to everyone at Delib who worked so hard to make the day such a success, especially Natalie Williams, Ben Griggs, Krista King, David Blayney, Jessie Ashmore and Jenni Weech. We’d also like to thank everyone at Unique Venues Birmingham who hosted us with such care, attention and style. We recommend the locally sourced brie sandwiches!