CityCamp London — Really Bloody Marvellous

CityCamp London ran for the first time over the weekend of October 8–10, 2010, drawing council officers, civic technologists, designers, and Londoners interested in local-government innovation into the unconference format that had been popularised in the U.S. by the CityCamp series organised by Kevin Curry. The London edition was organised by Catherine Howe — then a researcher and digital-engagement consultant, later a senior civil servant — alongside a coordinating team drawn from FutureGov, MySociety, the Open Rights Group, and London-borough digital staff.

The unconference format was specifically chosen to invert the usual local-government-conference dynamic. Rather than scheduled keynotes from senior officials, attendees pitched and self-organised sessions on a board the morning of each day, with topics ranging from open-data publication, to council web-form usability, to participatory budgeting, to the practical question of how council staff with no formal mandate were finding cover to ship anything new. Catherine Howe's writeup of the event — cross-posted to her blog and circulated through the early UK Gov 2.0 network — captured both the substantive sessions and the social-network effect of pulling these specific people into the same room for the first time.

CityCamp London ran for several more editions through the early 2010s and seeded a cluster of follow-on events and projects, including parts of what eventually became the FutureGov consultancy practice and several council-side digital-services teams that hired directly out of the attendee network. The first-edition writeup that this article preserved remains a useful artefact for the history of UK local-government digital practice — a lot of the people in the room would, over the following decade, become the senior civil servants leading exactly that practice.