Weeknote #3 — IIPP student policy placement — 2 June 2023

Weeknote #3

Over the last two weeks, we (Jacob, Ada, and Valentina) have continued our work as IIPP students on the placement with Camden Council to develop ideas on harnessing participation as part of their community wealth fund proposal, as discussed in our previous weeknotes.

During our second two-week sprint, we focused more on synthesising what we learned from our previous interviews and research to develop coherent prototypes for the participatory element of the Community Wealth Fund — which we can then test. While we have also continued collecting qualitative data from interviews and desk research — we feel we have largely moved on to the second diamond of the double diamond development framework, from exploring to define the problem, to researching to develop a refinable prototype solution.

Interim Presentation

We began our fourth week with an interim presentation which showcased our process of research so far, the framings of the problem we had developed, and our proposed next steps for the research. The attendees included the project sponsors Nick Kimber and Dave Burns, Camden Policy Designer Kieran Whiteside, and our supervisor and peers from IIPP. The feedback they gave us helped us to establish which frames match Camden’s views of what was important for participation to achieve, and who it would be useful to continue to talk to.

Week 4

We spent the rest of the week researching and developing a list of external stakeholders to consult with, and then we contacted them to arrange interviews. We also enjoyed virtually attending and learning from insights from other community participation leaders at the Stronger Things 2023 conference. At the end of last week, we did some rapid ideation to develop ideas individually which we merged into our first prototype. While we understood that this first iteration would be temporary and a lot of it would prove infeasible, we found this a really useful opportunity to assess what we each thought of the potential for participation in the wealth fund.

Week 5

This week, we started by developing a more formal interview structure so we could record interviews with ethics clearance. This also allowed us to get more targeted answers to our questions about the participation models of our subjects and relevant aspects of our own prototype that we would present in our interviews. So far, we interviewed representatives from Kindred, Camden’s inclusive economy team, and Power to Change. We used their feedback and the comments of our IIPP supervisors to develop our second prototype, after discussing with each other what we liked and what we wanted to change from the first. We then tested all the new elements of our new prototype with a causal chain exercise to understand where our intentions for the wealth fund were based on assumptions that may not prove true.

Next steps

In the final two weeks of our placement, we intend to test these assumptions through further stakeholder interviews, to iterate another version of our solution and provide reflections for our final presentation.