About DCC beta

Dublin City and Dublin City Council needs to be able to easily and regularly freely discuss ideas and to innovate – and to innovate you need to be able to experiment and to then learn from those experiments, and which in turn enables greater discussion.

We’re calling this overall ethos or approach ‘Dublin City Council beta’.

It’s  structured around these ’6 Ps’:

1. Permission
   It was initiated from City Architects as a staff member’s 10% Innovation Time project, and was formalised as a City Architects project in Jan 2014. This is a trial and so, naturally, shouldn’t be considered to be Dublin City Council corporate policy.
2. Purse
   We’re trialling the concept of a fund to allow projects to be run more quickly and independently. Read more…
3. People
   Staff have been self-selecting themselves and getting involved with various Beta Projects as required. These ‘diagonal slices’ across the organisation form ‘equal teams’ (non-grade based) with different competency staff seeing different parts of  the problem/solution.
4. Place
   We’ll return to this item in the future.
5. Process
   The method of trialling (what we’re calling Beta Projects) could be described as “lean startup meets the planning process”. We’re developing a single pre-agreed system for anyone trialling ideas in Dublin – whether Dublin City Council staff or Dublin City citizen. Read more…
6. Partners
   We’ll return to this item in the future.

“Beta” and “in beta” are labels used (mainly by the IT sector) to convey that something’s imperfect and is being released early so that it can benefit from some real-world testing and feedback. We adopted this phrase as it enables us to build ‘a brand’ (ie a recognisable ethos) with an associated and established method, whereas a generic phrase such as “trial” might mean different things to different people.

The hope is that it will become a clear and easily recognisable signal (to the public, the media, elected members, city council staff, and so on) that discussion is simply discussion and is not corporate policy, that trials (Beta Projects) will be used to further discussion, that those trials will will follow an established method and ethos, such as being temporary and using standard metrics and being highlighted clearly as trials actively looking for feedback and suggestions.

We’d love to hear what you think, and any questions or suggestions that you may have. Please bear in mind that all staff involved are doing so as they want to make this great city even better, and are generally doing so in top of their usual jobs (for example this is being typed at 9:30pm).