Supporting organisations to value community engagement — Part 2/3
Hello! Welcome back to our series on Community Engagement practices in the tech industry.
In our work at the Responsible Tech Collective, we are trying to answer the question:
“How might we engage people and communities in the design and development of technology”
We’ve already written an introductory blog here, so do take a look at this for more contextual info.
Over the last few months or so, we’ve done a lot of work! So sorry for the radio silence on here.
Where are we at?
We have been running in-depth interviews with big business, social enterprises, local authorities and community representatives to understand what community engagement means to them and explore the enablers and barriers to doing it in a genuinely reciprocal and equitable way . We’ve also conducting a deep dive into the literature to groups to explore our lines of enquiry:
- What are the barriers to organisations engaging communities in decision making around data and digital?
- What are the benefits to organisations of engaging communities in the design and development of technology?
- How do communities want to engage, participate and be involved in decision-making alongside organisations?
- What are the best ways to support grassroots participation and collective decision-making to support inclusion of diverse perspectives in the creation and delivery of technology?
We’ve analysed all of this insight and identified themes and patterns for the enablers and barriers to doing good community engagement.
Here’s a snapshot of what we learned. If you’re interested in the detail around this insight, take a look at our previous workshop board here.
We learned that there are three systemic factors that impact on how well (or not) organisations and communities engage with one another:
- Organisational responsibility — how much are organisations able to build in new approaches to decision-making?
- Community Connection — how well can organisations and communities develop reciprocal, nurturing relationship?
- Community Empowerment — how much agency do communities have to drive change and achieve their own goals?
Within these factors sits a series of enablers and barriers to good engagement between organisations and communities. These enablers and barriers maybe cultural dynamics, such as ‘ an enabling organisation culture that values community engagement’, or structural factors that impede progress, such as ‘Unequal commissioning structures that do not share their power and impact communities’ ability to define and lead projects’.
What are the opportunities?
Having learned so much about what good looks like regarding how to support people and communities to better engage with organisations, the next step was to identify what action we as the Responsible Tech Collective could take to unlock these insights.
We prioritised opportunity areas according to a matrix that took organisational needs, community needs and feasibility into account. Here are another couple snapshots from our gloriously messy miro board to give you a sense of our rough prioritisation factors:
Our process
Through this process we identified two opportunity areas that were in line with the priorities of our RTC members, felt like logical starting points in terms of enabling better community/organisational engagement and seemed feasible.
From this we consider the implications of these opportunity areas on project delivery, on RTC’s goals and member needs, on Noisy Cricket’s (as the lead facilitator for the RTC Infrastructure work) capacity and goals. This thinking enabling us to both make our decision about which opportunity areas to prioritise and begin developing ideas for them.
These opportunity areas were:
- How might we clarify and demonstrate the value of community engagement for organisations?
- How might support organisations to buy-in to community engagement; aligning leadership culture, direction and financial investment to opening up decision-making to communities
What next?
It made sense to begin exploring ‘value’ first, as we felt that would unlock space within organisations to align their structure and culture such that they could then buy in to community engagement.
From this starting point we began to explore what it could mean to clarify and demonstrate the value of community engagement.
Our prototype
To build a prototype around this opportunity that would allow us to test our hypothesis, we explored all the different angles for how we could enable organisations to understand and value how community engagement could help reach their goals:
We saw an opportunity for a service/content prototype that supported organisations to see the potential of community engagement for product performance, innovation as well for risk mitigation.
The key to this prototype is to understand what exactly organisations value, and help them to how they might unlock more of that value by engaging differently with communities.
Take a look at this image for a summary of what the prototype could be:
Next steps
We’re now building a survey and workshop activity with the objective of helping organisations within the RTC to define what they value most and explore how community engagement might (or already does) create additional value.
In addition to the objectives for shifting understanding around value, we hope these activities will enable us to document hypotheses and examples/stories for how community engagement can unlock value for organisations. This will inform the creation of an anthology; a piece of content that will articulate how doing ‘good enough’ community engagement could/already does meet organisational needs, create additional value and enable greater impact.
This anthology will be an evolving piece of content as more organisations engage with the survey and workshop activity and our understanding constantly shifts.
The survey is currently being circulated across the RTC and we are planning when to run the workshop activities. Once we’ve run these activities a few times, we will have content for our anthology.
Watch this space as we share updates on this prototype and what we’re learning from testing it!
If you have any questions, comments or are interested in getting involved in the testing, please do let us know at hello@noisycricket.org.uk .
