Planning for democracy: co-designing public infrastructure with planners

Theme: Co-design

Planning is a democratic function of the state. But for decades, the software supporting it has been designed without the people who use it. 

This session tells the story of BOPS, the Back Office Planning System, built through the UK Government's Open Digital Planning programme. Presented by Unboxed alongside a planning officer involved in its development, it explores what it means to co-design tools that sit at the heart of democratic decision-making, and what genuine collaboration across councils, disciplines and organisations actually looks like in practice.

Participant takeaways:

• a practical understanding of what sustained co-design looks like across multiple organisations, including the governance structures that make it viable and the tensions that never fully go away
• why investing in the tools used by public servants, not just public-facing services, can directly strengthen the quality and legitimacy of democratic decisions
• approaches to structuring multidisciplinary expertise into decision-making workflows, so that specialist input is coherent rather than fragmented
• how structuring professional judgment as data rather than narrative can improve transparency and consistency, and what it takes to bring practitioners with you through that change
• how open-source software, open standards and shared infrastructure can redistribute power away from incumbent suppliers and what the BOPS model suggests about building that ecosystem sustainably across local government