The Data Collective — Weeknote #3
By Tom French, user researcher for the Data Collective and facilitator of Sheffield Data For Good. This blog was originally published on the Data Collective website.
DataKind UK is leading a pilot for the Data Collective, a community for people from the social sector to come together, share good practice, and learn how data can help in their work. For more about the project, visit the website.
It’s been a big week for the Data Collective!
Firstly, the Data Collective website was launched thanks to project partner Ed Saperia of Newspeak House.
Secondly, we’ve started to offer some 1–2–1 support and more targeted workshops to organisations as part of the Data Collective’s wider offer beyond a community of practice. Another project partner, Social Finance, is providing this support.
And, thirdly, we held a user research workshop on Wednesday 27th January. Its purpose was to build on some of the things that we’d been hearing through the user research interviews to date. 30 people who work on data within charities met to discuss how the Data Collective should take shape — what the sector needs, how a new community could work, and what pitfalls to avoid. This will be my focus for the rest of this update….
A bit about the user research and where the workshop fits in
In many ways, the whole Data Collective pilot is all about user research. We’re trying some things out — how to bring people together, what to offer as support, when to broker conversations that may lead to collaborative working and, most importantly (in my opinion), how to frame the whole thing so that people know what it is, what it does and how it creates ‘value’ for them.
The user research — of which this week’s workshop was a part — is beginning to answer some broad questions, many of which have arisen as themes in our 121 interviews so far:
- Who is the Data Collective for and what are the roles of others?
- What is the Data Collective trying to achieve and what are the outcomes it wishes to bring about for different types of organisation?
- How can we talk about or frame the Data Collective to maximise engagement?
- Are there specific needs that people have for which they require support?
- What activities happen in the Data Collective?
- How do we organise and share outputs?
- How should the Data Collective operate and be organised beyond the pilot (ending in April)?
So, what happened at the workshop?
To save me (and you!) from describing exactly what happened, these slides should give you a sense of how we spent our time.
Appetite was high for this workshop, with over 50 people signing up for the event. This was encouraging, but it was also slightly daunting. Attendees were from a variety of voluntary sector organisations in terms of size, geography, focus, data maturity, and capacity. Once again, this highlights the need for the Data Collective to be aware of the diversity within its audience, many of whom will have very different identities and requirements. The tasks we had planned required people to be thrown together at random in small groups and find common ground for conversations…
…and it was great! I cannot praise the participants enough for their levels of engagement ‘in the room’, their generosity with input and how everyone supported each other. The benefit to attendees of meeting other data people from across the sector was clear from the feedback we received as well. As a consequence, there were positive, mutual outcomes for everyone involved and we now have a treasure trove of needs, ideas, thoughts, concerns, and feedback with which to start carving out answers to the user research questions. Some of these are detailed in this Twitter thread.
It was fun and creative too. The workshop’s sub-plot of how groups competed with each other for the best team name only helped the sense of togetherness and community. (My favourites were the Vanity Metrics and 5ive, an unexpected nod to the 90’s boy band favourites.)
So what kind of organisations were represented at the workshop? We used Mentimeter to get a sense of where people were from geographically, what the focus of their organisation was and how they perceived their level of Data Maturity, using a (very) simplified version of the excellent framework developed by DataKind UK and Data Orchard. Here’s what the results told us about those in the room…
What stood out from the workshop? And what does this tell us?
Three headlines emerged through this workshop and some of the feedback:
- Relationships matter and people like coming together. Moreover, people value the time to see each other’s faces and for that time to be set aside for conversations about data. In other words, people want to talk to and learn from each other but:
a) Put time in the diary to do this;
b) Keep groups relatively small;
c) Have a rough topic, question or idea about data to focus the conversation. - People can still have meaningful conversations with and learn from people who aren’t necessarily from the same ‘tribe’ of place, cause, role, data maturity or organisational size. By randomly assigning groups in the workshop there was a risk that there wouldn’t necessarily be common ground. And, in addition, our interviews have suggested that people intuitively feel that, for conversations to be productive, they need to be with people from organisations that look similar to theirs in some way. But that didn’t seem to be the case here. This requires further understanding.
- Some people find the Data Collective idea (as it’s currently described) confusing and ‘nebulous’ — see the image below. This has been highlighted in interviews and informal conversations too. We must work towards a clearer framing of what the Data Collective is, does and why it has a place to effectively engage with and encourage sharing between the people for which it is intended.
What happens next for the user research?
20 interviews are done. And our first workshop has happened.
We recognise that there are still many people from whom we’d like to hear views. So, if you’re looking in with some interest but not yet sure whether it’s for you, please take part in our user research survey — we want to hear what you think! Take the opportunity to help us shape the Data Collective so it works for you.
Sign up through our website, follow us on Twitter @DataCollective_ or The Data Collective LinkedIn. The Collective is funded by Catalyst, as part of the Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response fund.
