The document provides guidance on running a competition to develop digital solutions to local challenges. It discusses: 1. Opening up the development process by applying techniques to stimulate ideas, showing emerging ideas to build momentum, and helping people help each other develop solutions. 2. Ensuring benefits are realized by issuing challenges relevant to priorities, involving the public to suggest ideas, and agreeing criteria to review ideas and select prototypes for development. 3. Supporting the development of prototypes by explaining what a prototype entails, defining specifications, explaining the event process, and showing how to use open data. The document aims to help organizations run competitions that generate ideas and prototypes to inform service development through public engagement and collaboration with

1. Introduction
o How can you use the guide?
1. How can you involve people in developing solutions?
Apply techniques used in other disciplines to help people come up with ideas
o Show people what ideas are coming through to build momentum
Help people help each other develop solutions
o Coming up with ideas
o Case study: What skills would you want to share?
Focus ideas on community outcomes
o Break up the stages of developing ideas in ways which are practical
o Case study: What would make your area a better place?
Test new ways of producing research
o Explore how you can use the competition to gather and analyse insights
o Case study: How are we going to use the ideas?
Identify new technological trends
o What would make it easier for you to use technology?
o Case study: How do you think about how to make services easy to use?
Show your organisation how the ideas can inform their priorities
o Categorise ideas put forward to your competition
o Support citizens to shift to online personalised services
o Managing information to improve decision making
o Enable users to group together to solve problems

2. 2. How do you get people to take part in your competition?
Develop a stakeholder engagement strategy
o Work with your partners to engage and manage expectations
o Get feedback from stakeholders to design the message and process
3. How can you ensure the benefits can be realised?
Create measures of success
Issue challenges based on local priorities
o Issue challenges that are relevant to your service’s priorities
Involve the public to suggest ideas
o Identify what resources you can secure
o Collaborate with partners who can provide competition resources
Agree criteria to review ideas & prototypes
o Work with your partners and sponsors to design criteria
o Provide a competitive element by securing sponsors
o Select the most highly rated ideas to be developed into prototypes
4. How can you support people to come up with prototypes?
Explain what you mean by a prototype
o Tell developers what you want them to come up with
Define the specification to provide to developers
o Enable people to have the resources to help them develop prototypes
o Make systems and data integrated and re-usable
Explain to developers how the event will work
o Invite external participants to describe what resources could be used
o Update people on how the event will work how they can prepare
Show developers how they can use open data to come up with prototypes

3. 5. How can you involve partners in shaping the process?
o Involve people representing your partners
o Define the challenges
o Involve your staff to guide developers
o Define the expertise you have that can help people
Use approaches to help developers come up with prototypes at your event
o Provide a combination of structure and flexibility
o Invite people who are willing to make the day work
Review the prototypes
o Select criteria that you would use to review your own services
Use the judging to learn lessons from the prototypes
o Identify gaps and assets you can use to develop the idea
o Plan for future development of the prototype to ensure sustainability
o Design the prototype around the needs & assets of the customer group
o Use specialist techniques to help develop the idea into a prototype
o Consider tools that make the user fully engaged with the prototype
Offer prizes for the competition
o Offer prizes to the winners of the best idea and prototype
o Provide non-financial prizes to help take forward the prototypes
Provide routes for ideas and prototypes who haven’t won
o Ensure that people can continue to work on prototypes together
o Report the event so others can learn from it
o Celebrate and recognise everyone’s contribution
Identify what could be improved after the competition
o Work through strong relationships and existing networks
o What could we have improved?

4. Introduction
With the financial constraints they face, public services need to explore more agile and
efficient ways of making use of ICT.
Various councils have responded to this through launching calls for ideas or competitions,
whether it's involving staff and users to rethink ways of working, getting ideas for local
budgets, developing banks of social capital or connecting students with entrepreneurs to stimulate
innovation.
We have co-designed a programme to help public services in Kent engage communities
& SMEs to prototype solutions to local challenges.
We designed an approach focused on impact and sustainability by getting
entrepreneurs to build on community ideas and secured partners to get residents to test
prototypes and experts to support the winners to develop business models.
Through the lessons learned from this programme, we’ve developed a guide to help
organisations who are looking to get
o ideas and prototypes that be used as applied research to inform development
of projects and services
o methods of engagement & access to digital entrepreneurs to explore
opportunities for future collaboration & joint development of solutions
What is Kent Connects?
Kent Connects is the lead technology partnership for Kent and Medway. It has already
invested in a single, county wide infrastructure (both technology and people) to enable its
partners to join up and share their services delivery mechanisms in a secure, robust and
cost effective environment.
Kent Connects is an extremely effective and productive strategic partnership facilitating
partner projects by providing advice and sharing best practice and resources.
If you would like to find out more about Kent Connects or Developing Solutions, please email
enquire@kentconnects.gov.uk.

5. How can you use the guide?
Please find below symbols to help you understand how to use the guide:
Categories Examples
Sections of the guide
Steps of the process
Recommendations
Examples used in
our competition

6. 1. How can you open up the development of solutions?
To open up the development of ideas and solutions to entrepreneurs, universities &
colleges and public service staff:
Apply techniques used in other disciplines to help people come up with ideas
o Apply techniques used in disciplines like design & research or even fields like art or
community development – such as blank canvas or skills dating - to stimulate people to
come up with ideas
People might have seen something that uses technology in a really creative way. Encourage
them through the online platform to think about how these new ways of using ICT could help
improve their neighbourhood or public services.
Show people what ideas are coming through
to build momentum
o We blogged “idea of the week” to highlight
good ideas coming through
o To be open and transparent, we
published the scores of all the ideas.
Help people help each other develop solutions
Coming up with ideas sounds really easy, but sometimes to get the simple but most effective
ones, it's worth thinking about how to stimulate them. Breaking up the ideas makes the
process seem more meaningful to people taking part and more likely for them to want to
work together to develop the ideas.
Coming up with ideas
We started off by looking at what skills people
want to learn and share and then onto what
would make it easier for them to use technology,
how people want to make their neighbourhood a
better place and how people want to help each
other.
What skills would you want to share?
From showing people how to cook to encouraging
young people into sport , many of the ideas
build on people's personal motivations to
either learn or share expertise with others.
This is often the easiest way of getting
individuals to help each other.
Focus ideas on community outcomes

7. o Break up the stages of developing ideas in ways which are practical – such as
what skills people want to learn and share, how people want to improve their neighbourhood
and how people want to help each other
What would make your neighbourhood a better place?
We wanted to enable people to reflect on what would make
their neighbourhood a better place. It was very striking how
much people focused on what physical
improvements were needed, whether it was making their
streets cleaner or look more appealing - and
what behaviour changes could improve community spirit.
Test new ways of producing research
o Explore how you can use the competition in such a way that you can gather
and analyse insights and prototype ways to turn ideas into research
How are we going to use the ideas?
We explored how we could make sense of the ideas people
submitted as new forms of community insight. This included
mapping a "neighbourhood of ideas" or creating personas on
how people want to help others.
Identify new technological trends
If you want to understand how your service can adapt to the changing trends in how
people use technology and what tools they use, design approaches that enable you to
gain insights on how
o people can move to digital by default by focusing on what would make it easier for
people to use technology
o you can encourage re-use of your ICT assets and of your partners such as open
data, customer relationship systems and development environments
What would make it easier for you to use technology?
All of us will reject a way of doing things that we think will
make us look stupid whether it’s learning how to use
technology or repairing a car.
We worked with community groups & students to help them
come up with ideas that can help them think about what
makes it easier for them to want to use ICT!

8. How can you think innovatively about how to
make services easier to use?
Many people put forward simple solutions
from being able to access information in a
single place to being able to contact people in
your neighbourhood via getting text alerts when
your bin needs emptying.
Show your organisation how the ideas can inform their priorities
To understand the potential of this process to provide applied research to inform
development of projects and services, categorise the ideas put forward to your
competition by different types of approaches based on how they can improve the
capability of partners to deliver their priorities or inform the development of services.
This will help you work out where to direct the ideas in your services and in what areas
your customers and partners would be enthusiastic in providing feedback on or even
shaping projects that you want to involve them in.
Types of approaches to improve the capability of partners
Over 40% of ideas support citizens to shift to personalised online services, while close to
30% show a desire to make the best use of technology assets owned by public services,
while over a quarter could support them to solve their own problems. Slightly less popular
were approaches to support people to group together to solve their own problems or to
manage information to improve decision making.
See http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/types-of-
approaches-2 to visualise

9. 2. How do you get people to take part in your competition?
To ensure you can test out effective “methods of engagement and access to digital
entrepreneurs to explore opportunities for future collaboration & joint development of
solutions”:
Develop a stakeholder engagement strategy
o Work with your partners to ask questions you could use to understand how to
engage and manage expectations. These could include:
o What audiences do you want to reach out to?
o Why would persuade them to take part in the event?
o What content would appeal to them?
o What content should you feature?
o What format would appeal to them?
o How can they contribute?
o What tools can you provide that enable them to contribute?
Get feedback from stakeholders to design the message and process
Feedback provided suggested we should focus on the following:
o Can do something for the good of the public
o People are willing to go the extra mile
o Create commitment by the councils to work with the developers to get the apps
adopted
o Signposting to the website & marketing the app
o Focus on market share, content and reach
We worked with existing networks to identify
and invite 1230 local and over 5000 national
members to take part
o invited over 370 professionals &
groups in Kent working in the ICT
sector
o partnered with local colleges and
organisations to host workshops to
enable 140 users to submit ideas to the
competition
o promoted the competition at key
facilities including 12 Libraries and 9
Gateways, as well as to 120 delegates
at the Kent Connects Conference
o issued press releases to 90 media outlets and got press in UKAuthoriITy, The
Register, LGC and the Guardian and received High Impact Status from the Global
Entrepreneurship Week
o secured participants to the event from across Kent and beyond with 40 delegates
attending

11. 3. How can you ensure the benefits can be realised?
Create measures of success
Before identifying any indicators that come to mind, start up with exploring those measures
of success which can show how (well) you’ve achieved your objectives, managing the
balance between qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Objectives Measures Targets Actual %
Over/Under
Target
Issue challenges based on local priorities
To ensure that the entrepreneurs you engage can produce ideas and prototypes that can
be used as applied research to inform development of your projects and services,
design approaches that:
o Issue challenges1 that are relevant to your service’s priorities and accessible
enough for the public to relate to and where you can provide ICT assets to
developers to use
What were the challenges we issued?
There are two challenges we invited people to submit their ideas to on how the use of digital
technology can…
1. Help people help each other in your neighbourhood
There are many opportunities for how the use of technology could improve people’s
neighbourhood, whether it's to help people find a voice, share skills for a good cause, or
even organise community cleanups.
2. Make it easier for you to report issues to your council
There are many ways that technology is being used for people to report issues, whether it's
reporting a pothole that needs fixing, texting in a photo of waste on the street or sharing your
experience with frontline staff. And that information can be used in really creative ways. But
there are issues which people can’t report easily.
Who was eligible to participate?
This competition is open to any UK resident. To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all
visualizations and other contributions you make to this challenge will be covered under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
1
1. Help people help each other in your neighbourhood and 2. Make it easier for you to report issues to your council

12. Involve the public to suggest ideas
o Identify what resources you can secure to enable you to involve people to suggest
ideas online on how ICT could be used to tackle those challenges in advance of the
event you invite them to
Collaborate with partners who can provide competition resources
Kent Connects partnered with DotGovLabs to develop an online space for the
competition at http://bit.ly/submityouridea, securing over 16,2292 views on the
competition website, 254 comments with 8 prototypes put forward.
The proportional increase in people engaging in the competition showed that the
development and stimulation of ideas built strong momentum for getting people
exciting about the process.
What is Dot Gov Labs?
Dot Gov Labs is an online innovation
competition platform which has over
1700 entrepreneurs, developers and
users of public services. Public service
agencies (so far including DWP, NHS
and Cabinet Office) put forward
challenges they require ICT solutions
to and people are invited to submit
ideas to these. Each challenge will
have different criteria and prizes, but
runs through the same process.
We also obtained venues & organisation of events by Mid Kent & Thanet
Colleges, Turner Contemporary & Gravesham DC with 200 people.
Agree criteria to review ideas & prototypes
o Work with your partners and sponsors to design criteria that means you can use
the ideas to inform the development of projects and services
o Provide a competitive element by securing sponsors 3 to provide awards to the
best ideas and prototypes developed
Select the most highly rated ideas to be developed into prototypes
The winners of the best ideas - a civic entrepreneur developing a way to incentivise people to
look after each other and local students making it easier for their neighbours to use their
smart phones to access services - demonstrated the key principles we’ve been encouraging.
The ideas put forward to both Challenges were evaluated by the Judges based on the
following criteria:
o How well could the idea help people help each other?
o How easily could the technology suggested be used by people?
o How well could this idea offer volume of take up that would deliver a profit?
2
The most viewed challenge on http://dotgovlabs.direct.gov.uk since it began in 2010
3
Sponsored by Kent Business School, Lagan, Geovation and Ordnance Survey

13. The ideas with the highest ratings overall were:
o Challenge #1 “Help People Help Each Other”: Sunshine Bank “Online community of
young people and others who earn virtual tokens of recognition for posting the things they do
to take care of themselves, other people and our world” developed by a digital
entrepreneur
o Challenge #2: “Make It Easier to Report Issues”: Abbreviation 999 “When a friend
asks you for a number for the doctors but you don't know the number, use this app.
When looking for a good taxi service but you can't remember the number, use this”
developed by a group of students from Thanet College.

14. 4. How can you support people to come up with prototypes?
Explain what you mean by a prototype
o Tell developers that you want them to come up with visual representations of
what the person is putting forward (i.e. a website, app, etc), but these don’t need
to be working applications. Prototypes therefore could be wireframes, screenshots,
mockups, prototype websites, etc.
To give you an idea of prototypes developed in similar circumstances included Rewired State,
CityCamp Brighton and SI Camp (all developed over 48 hours).
Define the specification to provide to developers
o Enable your digital entrepreneurs to have the resources to help them develop
prototypes that could work with your organisation’s systems.
Make systems and data integrated and re-
usable
We provided developers with a data request
facility from www.openkent.org.uk and provision
of the Lagan Open 311 Environment for
developers to create apps that link their sites,
social networks or mobile applications direct to
council customer relationship systems.
We also opened our technical and enterprise
architecture to SMEs to improve front/back
office integration with external apps (as
demonstrated by developers being able to use
Open 311 and OS Open Space) and created
open APIs4 - as demonstrated by the APIs of
Events & Activities data and overall open data
from Open Kent.
This enabled developers to come up with
prototypes in under a day from wire frames,
apps to mashups to outline specifications.
Explain to developers how the event will work
4
Like Mumsnet using Directgov tools built on standardised interfaces to provide their users with official up-to-date information
on schools and family services

15. o Invite external participants to describe what resources could be used to help
people develop prototypes.
o Update people on how the event would work and how they could prepare in advance
of the day by describing the challenges and what developers could consider when
building on ideas
We hosted a twitter chat to discuss any queries people had about the event.
Show developers how they can use open data to come up with prototypes
Local public services also have ICT assets that could be re-used by entrepreneurs. There
are amazing opportunities for open data to be used. Competitions organised across the
world have shown how effective they are at illustrating the opportunities it can offer to the
public. You can see a selection of them here.
We know that open data is a very new area for the public. Most people will never have heard
of open data, let alone used it to create visualisations. Others however may have used tools
to turn data into new web applications. They are also using APIs from customer relationship
management systems in a similar way. That’s why it’s an opportunity for public services to
stimulate use of open data by encouraging innovators to use datasets to turn ideas into new
ways of using technology.
o Work with relevant partners who could sponsor and support the development of the winning
prototypes
o Get senior stakeholders within the partners organising the competition to review the
prototypes to give them ownership over the process
o Involve officers with different types of skills from our partner organisations to act as critical
friends
o Profile the winning prototypes to provide them with kudos and credibility
Show prototypes that have been developed through similar competitions
We reviewed prototypes that had been developed through similar competitions and uses of
open data and open 311 to show people taking part in our competition how they could prepare
for developing prototypes on the day.
“
The best entries aren't necessarily the technically brilliant applications. It is more about making somethi
.” ( Jim Morton, Applications Architect for Warwickshire County Council)
“
It is a great opportunity to be really imaginative and yet produce something that will have a solid local im
” (Kevin Malley, from Bristol Futures)

16. 5. How can you involve partners in shaping the process?
o Involve people representing your partners to review the ideas and prototypes
basing the criteria on financial and social impact
Define the challenges
We defined the challenges for developers in a much more technical way than we did for local
communities:
o Challenge 1: Help people help each
other in your neighbourhood”, they will
be asked to develop a prototype based on
an idea submitted by the public in that
challenge and use OS Open Data.
o Challenge 2: Make it easier for you to
report issues to your council, they will be
asked to develop a prototype based on an
idea submitted by the public in that
challenge. They will also be able to use the
Lagan Open 311 Integration Toolkit if they
wish.
Define the expertise you have that can help people
o Involve your staff to advise and guide developers on how their prototypes would
work in a public service environment, as well as learn new techniques themselves.
The expertise provided by the critical friends for Developing Solutions included
o Designing wireframes and mock-ups of user interfaces
o Interaction design or user experience
o Creating applications using OS Open Data or OS Open Space
o Developing software prototypes, database design, APIs or outline code
o Managing customer focused projects
We learnt from the approach of partners,
such as Geovation we had purposefully
built relationships with to gain expertise on
how to develop competition-based
prototyping challenges. We are now helping
Geovation shape its forthcoming challenge
– the first ever focusing on localities

17. Use approaches to help developers come up with prototypes at your event
Just as you can learn from other disciplines to involve people to come up with ideas, use
approaches – like agile development - that can help developers come up with prototypes in
an easy and effective way
o Provide a combination of structure and flexibility to create an atmosphere of
purpose
Ensure the process of the day challenges people to prioritise and iterate exclusively based
on the criteria of the competition, focusing on value to the business and the customer.
“The structural elements for me included the competition (giving our activity
an edge and excitement), the time-bound nature of the day (we had to
present our work at the end of it), the identified roles on hand to help us out
(are there other roles that could help with the process perhaps groups?)
and John’s style of facilitation (which made everyone feel heard).”
(Participant on the day)
o Invite people who have a willingness to make the day work while having
different experiences to build trust amongst each other
Enable people to self-organise into teams. Beyond the people who put forward the
prototypes, invite people who can provide their cross-functional skills to help develop the
prototypes. This challenges them to work out as a team how to take decisions and
responsibility for specific tasks to produce the prototype.
“I think the main ingredient for me was we discussed without prejudice:
everyone expressed their opinions and that view-point was as valid as
anyone's; and reasoned argument was the name of the game. The day
worked because we had a belief in the goal.” (Participant on the day)

18. Review the prototypes
o Select criteria that you would use to review your own services or products.
This will mean the prototypes that have been developed can inform better ways of
designing and developing your own ICT applications
Submission Judging Criteria Score (1- Weighting Overall
Questions 5) (1-5) Score
(Score x
Weighting)
What’s the idea? How well the idea would 5
achieve the objective of the
Challenge selected
Who would it How well the idea put 2
help? forward would benefit and
help the selected target
audience
What technology How well the technology put 3
would it use? forward would be able to
implement the idea in a way
that could help the target
audience
How would people How well the process to use 4
use it? the idea would work on the
technology put forward and
could be used without
difficulty by the target
audience
What would you How well the idea could be 1
call the idea? understood to the target
audience?
What is the Does this idea offer the 3
potential volume of take up that would
commercial value deliver a reasonable profit
in this idea over costs?
Use the judging to learn lessons from the prototypes
Eight prototypes were developed below. The most popular type of outcome the prototypes
were trying to achieve was to help citizens use quality of life data to make choices,
including both Sunlighting in Kent and the Learning Game who won the prizes for Best
Prototype.
“The criteria gave us some ideas to work with, rather than determining
what we produced.” (Participant on the day)
You can see the individual evaluations of the prototypes hyperlinked below. Here is a
summary of the key points
o Identify gaps and assets you can use to develop the idea
o Learn from entrepreneurs working in public services on what gaps exist in the
market to spin out online services

19. o Build on existing work in opening up specific datasets, making it more likely to
make the prototype up to date and sustainable
o Show “connected difference”, by combining elements of innovations from the civil
society and technology sector
o Link up with competitors who are developing similar ideas and different skills
to explore opportunities to join up your idea with theirs5
o Plan for future development of the prototype to ensure sustainability
o Enable the flexibility for data from beyond the sector to be included into the
application, incentivising other stakeholders to provide data
o Look towards the future, on how to position the prototype with external
stakeholders as well as how it could be used by people within organisations
o Design the prototype around the needs & assets of the customer group
o Strip out all the complexity of the idea and focus exclusively on the needs you’re
trying to meet
o Tackle unmet needs with specific customer groups using existing infrastructure
and explore how the technology could be used in new ways
o Work with young people to build apps for the future that can improve the customer
experience
o Use specialist techniques to help develop the idea into a prototype
o Demonstrate clarity of purpose, tapping into what people might be thinking when
they’re online
o Use personas and scenarios from user design methodologies to describe the
prototype to people that can develop it
o Consider tools that make the user fully engaged with the prototype
o Provide the platform for people to take action using the assets displayed
o Make it “usable by default”, working off-line as well as online
o Think of the user by focusing on embedding mechanisms to build trust online
Offer prizes for the competition
o Offer prizes to the winners of the best idea and prototype of each of the
challenges you issue for your competition and explore if you can get them jointly
sponsored by suppliers or other organisations.
Provide non-financial prizes that can help winners take forward the prototypes
5
“As there were some similarities with Paul Brewer’s ‘I can help’ solution, we met to share ideas.” From evaluation of
Sunlighting in Kent

20. The “User Testing” Workshop is hosted by Tunbridge Wells Council bringing together a
selection of users of their services to test out the winning prototypes. The winners will also
be invited to gain vital feedback on how to improve usability.
The “Prototype to Proposition” Workshop is hosted by Kent Business School where a
cohort of its MBA students will work with entrepreneurs on developing a business proposition
that will help them take their prototypes to market.
Provide routes for ideas and prototypes who haven’t won
o Ensure that people who submit ideas that are not selected to go forward to the
next stage of the competition can continue to work on them together online.
Indeed these prototypes could be beneficial to other local areas and public services.
Social reporters are valuable not just to connect these ideas and tools between
communities, but to get people with those ideas to discover and link up with people!
o Report the event so others can
learn from it
The Big Lottery Fund’s Social Reporting
Programme was present at the Developing
Solutions Camp to capture insights on the day
as well as connect ideas with other projects
they’ve been working with.
They filmed video interviews and report the
event on new models of councils supporting
civil society using existing resources.
o Celebrate and recognise everyone’s
contribution
By participating at the event, all participants
received a Certificate valuing their
collaboration in helping develop prototypes
and they will be able to work with
professionals with a range of digital and
technical expertise in designing prototypes on
community-based ideas.
By profiling the ideas and prototypes, we’ve
provided the kudos and credibility to encourage
people who put them forward to pitch them to
other competitions, such as Computer
Weekly’s Awards or NESTA’s Innovation in
Giving.
Identify what could be improved after the competition
Work through strong relationships and existing networks to signpost the groups to
organisations related to their challenge area that the event organisers have a strong

21. relationship with. Recommend encouraging groups to make use of their own relationships to
take forward their prototypes.