New Nomad News!

The nomad local government community is in transition and key figures continue to work hard behind the scenes to establish a new and sustainable future.

It is evident that there is huge interest across the public sector in new work styles, asset rationalisation and technology enabled transformation. The current and forecast pressures on public spending serve only to further raise the profile of these issues and it is becoming apparent that the learning acquired within local government has relevance to the rest of the public sector and the challenges we all face going forward are very similar indeed.

Recent mobile working events and the mobile working survey, undertaken in conjunction with Public Sector Forums and NDL, have confirmed that there is an enthusiasm for nomad to continue and for the public sector to establish a modern and dynamic forum for peer to peer support, experience sharing, innovation and thought leadership.

Ken Eastwood, Nomad’s new National Lead, is in discussion with various public and private sector organisations to secure support for the development and maintenance of a new online platform and ways to resource our membership administration, community facilitation and events organisation.

Our vision is for nomad to establish an overarching community, consisting of groups of interest organised by sector, e.g. local government, NHS and by region, e.g. Nomad Scotland. We are widely researching approaches taken to building and supporting online communities and have been inspired by some of what we have seen, including by the excellent GovLoop in the States. There is exciting development work taking place right now and we’re looking forward to sharing that with members in due course.

As a first step, we’ve set up our ‘news’ site with basic interactive facilities over at publicsectorNOMADS

Members may wish to signup to the new site, subscribe to receive email or RSS updates and begin to add comment to the online debate. The new site will give members a taste of likely future direction, whilst work continues behind the scenes on this new platform to also house new and legacy nomad content.  

As we build a new future for nomad you can play your part by engaging with the community. Tell us what you are doing or the challenges you face;

• Do you have content that would be of interest to others?
• What challenges are you facing and how could nomad help?
• Do you have ‘news’ to post on publicsectorNOMADS?
• Do you have views on our direction and helpful suggestions to share?
• We would love to hear from you – online or by email to:   mail@publicsectornomads.com

Melanie Reed
Local Government Community & Events Facilitator
publicsectorNOMADS