Opening up technology design and development to people and communities — Part 1/3

Hello there, we’re back blogging to introduce our next infrastructure project at the Responsible Tech Collective:

“How might we engage people and communities in the design and development of technology”

For more detail on our infrastructure project series, take a look at this blog here.

As a quick reminder, the Responsible Tech Collective is a community of cross-sector organisations and community representatives based in Greater Manchester who together want to put people first when it comes the the creation and deployment of technology.

Via a process of co-creation, the Responsible Tech Collective members collectively agreed to work on five key infrastructure projects, in order to build and develop the practice of the Collective. They voted to prioritise five different opportunities to develop our infrastructure:

1. How might we share individual learning and enable collective progress?
2. How might we engage people and communities in the design and development of technology?
3. How might we demonstrate the business value of responsible tech and its ability to meet business goals?
4. How might we set standards and shape best practice?
5. How might we enable policy, process and practice adoption?

To explore this opportunity, we are running a series of research and design sprints, involving user research and co-creation workshops with both Responsible Tech Collective members and non-members. We wish to explore the barriers, needs and opportunity areas for better, more reciprocal engagement between businesses in the tech sector and communities, to inform and influence positive change in the tech industry in Greater Manchester and further afield.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

Design Questions

We have a mixture of open-ended lines of enquiry to explore, as well as more specific hypotheses to test. Here are a sample of these questions:

Creating space within organisations for community engagement

• What are the enablers and barriers to organisations effectively and sustainably using existing resources to inform and enable their co-production practice?
• How might we enable businesses to explore ways to move away from entrenched processes and rigid practices (e.g. waterfall project management, tight timeframes, narrowly defined problems/briefs) to create space for involving communities in the design and development of technology?
• What does effective and reciprocal community engagement look like at the different stages of the data, design and development processes?

Barriers to organisations using inclusive engagement methods

• What are the barriers to organisations understanding the value that reciprocal community engagement can have on building consumer trust and motivating employees?
• How might we enable businesses to better understand how to reach vulnerable people and marginalised communities so they can better engage communities?
• How might we enable organisations to confidently deal with the ethics and safeguarding risks of engaging with vulnerable people and marginalised communities so they can explore the potential of community engagement?

Different approaches to community engagement

• What are the barriers and enabling factors to organisations engaging with a greater range of community engagement practices, to go beyond consultation to more advanced practice (e.g. citizen juries, co-production, co-creation)?

Barriers and enablers to communities’ sense of autonomy

• Which community engagement practices engender the greatest sense of autonomy and trust for communities?
• How might we support organisations to build trust with communities they service through better and more transparent digital/data practises?
• How might organisations enable people to have a greater sense of ownership and choice regarding their data and digital products, such that they build a more trusting relationship?

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Methodology and Approach

We are following a fairly classical design approach, with a lot of room to iterate and pivot depending on what we learn.

Get Involved

If you’d like to get involved, we are recruiting interview participants for our first research sprint from the following groups:

Audience

• RTC Practitioner Members: Digital and Data Teams / In House and Agency / Public and Private Sector
• RTC Community Members: VSCE Support Organisations / Charity and Social Enterprises / Front line Workers and Marginalised People

Please take a look at this google form for more details.

We’re conducting these interviews now until w/c 1st August. If you are interested, please fill out your details in the link above and we (Lauren Coulman and Emma Diamond of Noisy Cricket) will get in touch. Any questions, please contact Emma at emma@noisycricket.org.uk.

If you can’t make the interviews but want to get involved in the project, we’re running an Insight Review workshop on Tuesday 6th September at 1pm and an Ideation workshop on Tuesday 13th September at 10.30am. Go to eventbrite here and here to sign up!

We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog, so watch this space!