Weeknotes 71 (27 April — 1 May)
These Digital Fund Weeknotes are a bit harder to write now that we are being pulled in multiple different directions. Beth, Phoebe and I are super busy right now and our areas of focus are shifting as we continue to support the Fund’s response to the current moment in various different ways.
Usually I would format these Weeknotes with the headings What We’re Doing, What We’re Learning and What We’re Celebrating, or along our various strands of work. But right now I’m finding the categories we used to rely on don’t quite fit in the same way. It feels as though the boundaries between thematic areas are blurring and silos are being somewhat dismantled.
Old boundaries, new connections
For example, this week I joined a Financial Champions meetup to feed in to training they are creating for funding officers — this was new and I have limited financial expertise, but the organisers recognised the need for diverse experiences in the creation of this resource. In another example, when a colleague came to me for advice on an assessment they were making on a proposal that wanted to start a new online learning platform for young people, I made sure to bring in someone else with expertise in youth voice and youth-led approaches to the conversation . This isn’t uncommon but we hadn’t crossed paths in this way before, and in so doing we found that the questions they asked to encourage good grantmaking for youth projects were really similar to those that I asked to encourage good grantmaking for digital projects:
How have they established need for this service? How do they know this is what young people need during the crisis i.e. what have young people said?
How do they know the content will work digitally? They sound an experienced face-to-face practitioner but unfortunately this does not translate automatically online.
Who else is providing information like this in this space?
It sounds like a whole new project — are they confident they will be able to build the content, promote and engage in six months?
This was a great example of how ‘good digital grantmaking’ is really just ‘good grantmaking’.
We’ve also had new members join the Digital, Data and Technology Community of Practice who have various experiences and areas of interest, which is exciting! This has become a great space to swap insights and ideas, with a genuinely really lovely and knowledgeable group of people across all four countries we work in.
This sense of new connections also came up in the new ‘Scanning and Sensemaking’ programme that Cassie and Hannah are running with colleagues across the whole organisation and Graham from International Futures Forum. We’re using the Three Horizons framework to look for what is emerging on the road to the new normal. We’re meeting every Friday for a collaborative workshop to discuss what the scanners found throughout the week, and using Mural to map it out (see below).
One picture that seems to already be building up is this increase in new/better connections — as evidence by these post-its: ‘partnership building across the community’, ‘trusted relationships in action’, ‘interaction with others and supporting others’, ‘a rapid increase in cross-sector activities (esp in areas where this once was a problem)’, ‘Consult; involve; work with as many as possible to develop a ‘recovery and ‘rebuild’ plan’.
Otherwise the majority of both mine and Beth’s work this week was consumed with emergency response funding. This involves a lot of coordination and communication between different teams, colleagues, grantholders and applicants; developing processes; making assessments and writing papers— all ‘at pace’ (a phrase we have started to resent…)
Responsible Technology
Phoebe has been holding down the fort with the Digital Fund grantholders and this week wrapped up the monthly learning theme for April, Responsible Technology, with a webinar and a number of blogs (a couple of which will be posted shortly).
The webinar featured panellists Alex Mecklenburg from Doteveryone, Matthew Black from Best Beginnings, Lynne Davis from Open Food Network and Charlotte from Carefree.
These brilliant panellists brought different perspectives to the question of how to approach responsible innovation and develop principles towards doing that well. Over the last months, Alex has been delivering training to all of our Digital Fund grantees on Doteveryone’s ‘Consequence Scanning’ practice — and it has been especially important for our Strand two charities to flex the muscle of scanning the horizon for unintended (not labelling ‘good’ or ‘bad’) consequences. Phoebe’s highlights from the webinar:
One main takeaway was difference between ethics and principles — how to take ‘values and ethics’ which can be very abstract and ungrounded to principles that actually lead to behaviour change on the ground.
Important part of consequence scanning is iteration and experimentation — can’t let it hold back innovation — need to incorporate as part of an agile development cycle
Another angle to think about responsible technology is also what we choose to spend public money on — choosing not to create technology from scratch is also responsibility — not building ‘new code’
The group talked about the change in behaviour in the teams needed to do responsible tech — it’s not another methodology to follow religiously — it’s about developing a muscle and practice — and about new practices within the team
Matthew from Best Beginnings also published the following blog on our Medium:
It’s a really great read that shares Best Beginnings responsible innovation journey. One quote that speaks to my thoughts on the signs of dismantling silos:
The first session we ran was a consequence scan of the very product principles that we have written for the development of a new digital platform that we are creating with TNLCF funding. It was important to have a multi-disciplinary voice reflect on our work, so we invited members of different teams at Best Beginnings to take part. The group identified potential unintended consequences of our principles; highlighting impacts that the Digital Team had not considered. We collectively agreed on the positive consequences that the Digital Team would focus on and chose the consequences that required mitigation.
Time will tell how this practice plays out in our digital projects, but the exercise has since been adopted by other teams at Best Beginnings, showing us that Responsible Innovation does not only apply to tech innovations, but to all delivery arms of an organisation.
Next month the theme that the sensemaking and insight gathering will be focused on is ‘What is essential’ which Phoebe says she’s very excited about as it feels like such a vital and relevant question to be asking.
Support partners
Part of Phoebe’s work has also been in how to support and facilitate the group of support partners to best work together and support the grantholders. Each support partner brings a unique and complementary approach and part of what the group is exploring now is how to offer this support package in a way that is holistic and doesn’t leave anything falling through the cracks. The problem with when any group/team has to move too quickly is that there isn’t time or space to consider how they could save effort and time and create more efficient and holistic ways of working. The team will have a 2-hour window next week to work through this and converge on the beginning of a new approach. We’ll write more about this next week!
It’s been a busy week with not much time for individual or collective reflection — something I hope will change in the coming weeks. As always though, ultimately closing the week grateful for this busyness and with sincere gratitude for those who are working to keep us all going.
