Local Gov - Working better together - Collaboration

Local Government
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During the Local Gov - Working better together event unconference yesterday there was some discussion about improving cross-council collaboration. One of the suggestions that came out of the discussion was the idea of setting up an casual collaboration space that any users from any council could join (as well as Netcall staff obviously) where topics could be quickly spun up to discuss projects currently being worked on/soon to be started and/or individual widgets/functions/ideas. It seemed like there was a reasonable amount of support for just throwing together a quick, free slack instance and inviting people to it pretty freely, however it seems the free slack is limited to 1:1 video/audio chats which could be restrictive. I thought it might be good to start a forums discussion to try and find a good platform for this. Some of the ones I’m aware of are:

  1. This forum (we would probably need some more categories)
  2. Slack (still useable despite the aforementioned limitation)
  3. Teams (I think there are some limits on the use of the Teams functionality within the free Teams)
  4. Discord (a bit more geared towards gaming/casual communities. Not very work focussed)

@CraigBarker_Cumbria tagging you as i think you were leading the discussion

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Option 1 & 4 seem like good choices.

We’ve been using Netcall Liberty Create for just over a year now, and have done some interesting work around Tasks and Security, we’d be glad to share.

JonathanFS
East Hants District Council.

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Having mentioned Discord, I’ve just tried to access the site at work and it’s currently blocked. I could probably get it unblocked if needed but it’s likely it would be necessary for every council which would be a bit of a nuisance for something casual. Pity as I believe it provides all of the multi-user text and voice channel functionality in the free version which slack and teams seem not to do.

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I’m liking the idea of a slack channel. Like you say Ali Discord might be blocked in a lot of councils. Using this channel might be a little reliant on Netcall, however with a slack channel the council’s can make it their own

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I’ve thrown together this quick Teams team (in hindsight Microsoft, not actually the best name) to give it a try. Went with Teams as it allows the whole channels/thread system as well as multi user audio calls at the free tier, whereas slack seems to limit free tier calls to just 1 to 1.

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