Open working — Why it’s important to us at The Making Rooms
This is my first post on medium, which is about why open working is important to The Making Rooms.
We recently started the Power to Change — Discovery Programme, which provides funding for a community project, as well as support on the skills and processed needed during planning and development.
Why is open working important for us?
There are lots and lots of reasons that open working is important, but here are a few handpicked ones that resonated with me:
I think open working helps establish more trust with the community, as well as being able to incorporate more of the communities feedback.
It also leads to an increased sense of accountability for everyone involved — Being able to truly see the impact of the contributions people make, and seeing the progress made about the project helps more people feel confident to jump in and contribute too.
Publishing all of our work also makes it easy for other organisations to easily use and adapt our work to benefit their own communities, which might help expedite processes when existing research/work can be reused as opposed to having to reinvent the wheel.
As mentioned before, a lot of the above increases engagement with the community, and I have learnt this week that companies that adopt a open working model are more likely to stand out from the crowd.
What sort of things will we publish and how?
Most of the work and research that goes into the project really. Making week notes similar to this will help to capture my state of mind for the week, which will help in the future when coming back to research and figuring out why a particular decision was made.
Things like source code and user research will also be released, so others can see not only the end result of the research, but the data involved in the middle, which again might be able to help other organisations by reducing the work and research needed. Platforms like GitHub can be used for this.
