Charities catch the ‘working in the open’ bug

A whopping 28 charities on funded programmes have already made their work — including research, design and processes — available for others to use.

The working in the open journey

For those who haven’t worked in the open before, it can take a leap of faith to actually publish something for the first time. The idea of putting something into the world that’s half-finished is not common and can feel uncomfortable.

The OWLs have seen people follow the ‘working in the open’ journey, which follows someone learning what open working is, giving it a go for the first time, feeling unsure then getting feedback and wondering about doing it again. When they publish again and experience more of the benefits — including meeting others, finding information and feeling good, then begin to do it more often (even working openly by default) and helping others to share.

Benefits to working in the open

As the charities have started the process of understanding how to work in the open, they’ve also been thinking about the reasons why it’s good to work in this way.

In their own words, benefits for the people working openly include: “enabling connection and opportunities”, “positioning you well for getting funding’ and “saving time on your report writing at the end”.

For those finding and using the open work, benefits include: “saving time if others have already made the mistakes or done the learning for you already” and “allowing me to give more time to core or bespoke activity, having gained solutions for back office tasks”.

It was also noted that using open work “avoids the duplication of work and effort. Why reinvent something if it already has been created? It’s better to put energy into making it better”.

Working in the open is good for everybody, with one person summing up: “you can share your experiences, knowledge and resources with others and they can also share theirs with you. You can both learn from each other and also adapt your own way of working, if their way works better”.

Working in the open in numbers

• 131 charities have committed to working openly
• 9 have completed their projects
• 55 are halfway through solo or collective 10-week projects
• 57 have started projects and will be sharing in March and April
• 90 people have attended open working workshops
• 45 people are writing about their process and reflections on Catalyst Medium, LinkedIn or their organisation’s blogs
• 35 design outputs that others might reuse have been shared (we expect 150+ by 30 April 2021)

Everything that has been shared is able to be downloaded and reused as they are published under the Creative Commons licence.

Resources to help you share your work

If you want to write a blog post or weeknotes, use these blog post and weeknote templates to help you get started, and if you’re a Catalyst-supported project sign up to be a writer on Medium.