The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases.