Weeknotes (27th-31st January)
After more than a year of single-handedly holding the Weeknotes baton, Cassie, we’ve decided, deserves a break. She’s been meticulously evidencing what she’s been doing and sharing it publicly each week since she started as the Head of the Digital Fund in October 2018. Now that we have a whole dedicated Digital Fund team in place for the first time (Beth, Phoebe and I), we thought it about time to share the load.
I’ve loved Cassie’s Weeknotes. I can’t count how many people have told me they know about what we’re doing because of these blog posts, both inside and outside The National Lottery Community Fund. To external audiences, they’ve helped open up the daily workings of a large public sector organisation and provided insight into knew ideas and funding practices. To internal audiences, they’ve given access to a small and extremely busy team that is sometimes seen to be working at the fringes of the rest of the organisation.
So, from now on the four of us will either take turns or collectively write the Digital Fund’s Weeknotes as we continue into exciting new strands of work. This week, it’s one from me.
What we’re doing & learning
Micro-organisations discovery work
This was last Friday but I’m including it because (a) Friday was technically a week ago and (b) I’m desperate to mention it.
I travelled to Swansea to meet Cath, Erin and Arabella from Stripe Partners, who are going around the UK asking ‘What do micro-organisations need to thrive?’ for us. We commissioned this discovery research from them in December and this marked the end of the first week of fieldwork before they move on to Dundee, Liverpool and Derry. As a student of anthropology, I was excited to see how they apply the method of ethnography in a non-academic context and they didn’t disappoint.
Meeting all the people behind the micro-organisations was a pleasure. Outside of work I also volunteer in a similar context to the ones they’re working /volunteering in, spaces that were set up with one thing in mind and then quickly start to serve multiple different needs. Stripe Partners are writing all about what they’re doing and and what they’re finding in their excellent live field notes here.
Better Digital Grantmaking
On Thursday I was in Birmingham to meet lots of colleagues to discuss our plans for sharing learning internally around better digital grantmaking practice. I met with:
- One colleague in Knowledge & Learning to discuss how best to house our content and materials on our internal Knowledge Bank
- Two funding officers who have deep knowledge of the places and communities they work in to test some of these materials and a workshop I’ll be doing in Wales next week
- Head of Internal Communications to discuss written articles and other forms of content for sharing what we’re doing internally
On Wednesday Cassie did a lunchtime talk at the UK’s “Philanthropy House” with Association of Charitable Foundations, London Funders and the Funding Network. She spoke about the role of foundations in better equipping civil society to respond to and shape the dynamics of technology on our lives and in communities.
It was great to see an organisation like ACF convening around this topic, the attendees asked great questions, and alongside the impacts of the climate crisis there was some general agreement about the power of big tech being another large force that will determine our futures. Cassie drew on the Tech Policy cards we’ve developed as part of our Better Digital Grantmaking work to form some of the discussion afterwards.
The final part of the session was focused on what funders can do, and the group talked about in the first instance just bringing more awareness and understanding into the philanthropic community, and linking the impacts of tech to more commonly understood social justice concerns. There are also these talks, organised by Catalyst, that will be a great starting point for Foundations.
Responsible innovation with the Digital Fund grantholders
On Thursday Phoebe met with Digital Fund grantholders from Best Beginnings, Goodgym, Make-a-Wish UK and Law Centres Network to co-facilitate a workshop with Alex Mecklenburg on Consequence Scanning — which is a methodology and practice developed by Doteveryone to help individuals and organisations build the muscle to practice responsible innovation.
What this means in practice is scanning the horizon for ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ consequences — which can both be either positive or negative, and known or unknown. It’s a fascinating approach that can be applied for any product, service, or even decision which means that as well as an approach for technology production it can also be applied to leadership and help develop what Doteveryone calls “responsible innovators”.
What Phoebe really enjoyed was the aspect of going “beyond values” and “beyond ethics” — these can be very abstract concepts and instead the focus of the methodology is to develop product principles which are derived from the mission and a holistic view of what your intended and possible unintended consequences might be. Principles explained in another way are “what you say no to”. There was also a nuanced approach to responsibility, stressing that responsibility is a scale which invites organisations to decide where on that scale they lie.
The feedback from grantholders was great, with many already making plans for how they can incorporate this stage of consequence scanning into their agile development cycle. The workshop has now been iterated over 30 times and all of our Digital Fund grantholder organisations are encouraged to send 1–2 participants to a session as part of their grant. Thank you to Alex for the brilliant hosting and facilitation of the session!
Events
Away Days
We started the week with our second ever quarterly away day as a team (though we missed Beth). We had a packed agenda over Monday and Tuesday, with each of us facilitating sessions on:
- Patterns emerging and learning and insight from the current Digital Fund cohort of grantholders, including engagement and stewardship (hosted by Phoebe)
- Testing and cascading learning around Better Digital Grantmaking across the organisation, including content, stakeholder relationships, engagement and cascading tactics (hosted by Melissa)
- Round 2 of the Digital Fund and wider strategy (hosted by Cassie)
- Looking ahead: are our different strands of work making sense as a strategic whole? What does the next 3–6 months look like? (All)
As well as the valuable opportunity these days provide to problem solve, test ideas, align our thinking and learn about each others strands of work, I really value the social aspect of these days like eating together, sitting around the same table, learning about each others lives outside of work and even sitting quietly together whilst doing other things. We all work closely as a team but can often go for weeks without working together face to face, so the breaks, the unplanned and the minute details are super valuable.
Geoff Mulgan on How Societies Find the Power to Change
This intimate (but open to all) discussion was hosted by Cassie and Louise Pulford, CEO of SIX, and although not technically a Digital Fund work event, found many parallels with our work. Geoff Mulgan was most recently the CEO of Nesta and soon to be Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at UCL. He was there to talk about some of the ideas in his book on social innovation.
One argument Geoff made was that until innovation is institutionalised like science was in the 20th century, it will remain popular but only as independent projects and lack the systemic change it aspired to. I was particularly struck by one question from the audience in response to this: “Why is social innovation not just called socialism? Is it because its inherently apolitical?”
Another idea that was discussed that has made me think a lot is that the absence of shared social imaginary, our inability to imagine a better future, might be contributing to a general sense of malaise or depression. This reminded me of something I found emerging from the discovery work in Swansea —that there is a tension, or at least a difficulty to connect, between people who are desiring more systemic change and people acting as firefighters due to the immense pressure of running a micro-organisation.
Better Work in the Gig Economy
Back in the office on Wednesday and a very special visit to the House of Lords for the launch of Doteveryone’s new report. This was my first time in the Houses of Parliament and I was proud to be there to show my support for such an important topic.
Like Geoff’s talk, there was a big emphasis on dreaming and how current patterns of work don’t allow for the space to imagine a future outside of the present reality. In the report and discussion they asked how we can design technology to help change these patterns and make room for things like dreams, dignity and security. True to Doteveryone fashion, they didn’t just ask — they prototyped. Make sure to check out their report.
That’s all from me this week!
