Week 0.1 - thoughts on participatory grant making & digital

Posted by Paul Fawkesley on Wednesday 24 March 2021

We’re exploring how digital tools and technology could help to make grant-making radically more participatory. That means ceding decision-making power to the very communities that funders aim to serve.

It’s week 1 and we haven’t had our kick-off yet, so it’s early days - things will probably change!

We write weeknotes as an open and transparent way of documenting our thoughts, feelings, ideas and progress. Please read them so you can set us straight on any misunderstandings or pitfalls before we’re knee-deep in the project :)

Short version: this week we:

  • Had a great hello call with Conor
  • Planned activities for kick-off
  • Thought about the stages in a service map to illustrate the participatory grant-making process
  • Read Hannah’s Winston Churchill Fellowship report
  • Reflected on Hannah’s report and wrote up some thoughts (in this weeknote!)

Long version: thoughts so far

It’s about bringing communities and funders closer together

I took Hannah’s report to the garden with a cup of tea and a highlighter and made a stack of notes. It was a fascinating read and I came away buzzing with ideas and thoughts. There’s a lot there!

It seems to me there’s no definitive Participatory Grant Making (PGM) model: it’s new and different organisations are trying out different versions.

However it struck me that all PGM models have the effect of bringing communities and funders closer together.

PGM allows communities to learn how funders think. When communities can see how decisions are made and what successful applications look like, it helps them make better applications in the future. That’s even more true when communities peer-review applications.

PGM allows funders to learn the needs of the community. By speaking directly with communities they gain empathy and understanding of that community’s specific situation, which is often very different from their own.

Augment face-to-face contact, don’t replace it

When I first started thinking about how digital tools and technology might contribute in participation, one of my first thoughts was:

“Maybe we could just make all decisions online, rather than in stuffy consultation meetings that I can never get to since they’re in the middle of the day”

While I still think there’s something in this, it didn’t take long to realise this was too simplistic when it comes to participatory grant-making.

In PGM models, face to face meetings serve many purposes including building relationships, building trust, demystifying funders and most of all, learning from each other. PGM isn’t just about communities making decisions: it’s about building community leadership, and that requires networking, relationship building and learning.

With that in mind, I think it would be misguided to propose digital or technology solutions that replace well-run face to face meetings, but we should aim instead try to augment them.

Sounds vague… I’ll give some examples later on.

Simple voting is too reductive and favours popularity

Some forms of participation involve simple votes, for example “pick the project you like the most”. While democratic, a simple vote has problems:

  • Votes are biased towards more popular projects or confident presenters.
  • It only considers a single preference (with all the same issues as first past the post like splitting the vote)
  • It misses out on deliberation - discussion that enables deeper understanding of a project.

However, I think there’s a tendency to equate mass participation with simple voting. In other words, mass participation is not possible because it means simple voting, and simple voting’s not good.

I think mass participation can do better than simple voting. I’m interested to explore how tools can facilitate mass deliberation (like Taiwan crowdsourcing law-making).

Also, more sophisticated voting like single transferable vote (allowing an ordered list of preferences) which may alleviate problems in the PGM field as it does for elections.

Is there anything a digital tool could do 10x better?

It’s important that we don’t introduce tools for the sake of it but rather because they actually solve a problem or improve the status quo.

So what could digital tools bring to the table? Are there any ways in which digital tools could make things 10 times better compared with what was there before?

Off to the of my head, here are some _possible _10x improvements…

  • 10x more transparency in discussion and decisions. Digital tools could publish everything by default. Transparency improves trust and confidence, helps communities understand funding, and improves the quality of future applications.
  • supports 10x more people involved in decision making. Digital tools could reduce the obstacles to participation (like attending a physical meeting). More people involved in decision making could lead to greater diversity of the people making decisions and reduction of bias.
  • 10x easier to peer-review - Digital tools could simplify the peer-review process, opening it to a larger number of peers, reducing the required commitment and energy required to be a peer reviewer.
  • 10x easier to apply - Digital tools could make it dramatically easier by offering user-centred forms, offering different ways of applying e.g. video interview. This could widen the number of applicants from the “usual suspects”
  • 10x better communication between communities and fund staff. Digital tools could provide guidance within the tool to help applicants submit “higher quality” applications first time.
  • 10x more comments and opinions from communities about applications. Digital tools could reach a larger number of less-engaged (but still very important) people.

Idea areas: meeting Q&A, peer review, community feedback, deliberation

These are just some half-formed ideas of where digital tools could be involved in the process. They could do with some sketches - maybe next week!

Meeting Q&A - Participants at a face-to-face meeting submit questions via a simple web app, OR upvote an existing question. The most upvoted questions get answered first. This is a proven technique that 1) helps less confident people have a voice 2) prevents meetings being railroaded by a specific participant’s agenda. The lack of downvote option encourages productive interactions (if you don’t like it, ask a better question).

Peer review - side-by-side - A tool that enables “casual peer review” by a large number of people. Peers are presented 2 projects at once and asked e.g. “which project would affect the most people?”. This comparative approach is much simpler to complete than assigning a number from 1-5. A large number of peers can complete as many or as few pairs as they like. If enough peers participate it creates a statistical crowdsourced view of the relative strengths of each project for each criteria.

Peer review with dialogue - a tool that helps a peer to work through applications, highlighting specific sections with comments or questions for the applicant. The applicant has an opportunity to respond to comments. After an initial pass it could show what other peer reviewers asked and commented. This gives the applicant a chance to tweak their application after submitting, potentially reducing the stress of the initial application.

Online feedback + face-to-face - various tools exist for soliciting views and feedback from a wide number of people. This could augment a face-to-face meeting - feedback is gathered online before the meeting and raised in the meeting. This allows participation from a large number of less engaged (or more time-constrained!) people.

Deliberation - must look into how pol.is is used by Taiwan to reach consensus among large populations.

Prototyping: end-to-end service or specific points?

This is an area we need to discuss and agree in kick-off. Right now we know we’ll make a service map and some clickable prototypes.

In our response to the tender, we flagged our uncertainty about making an “end to end” prototype:

“We will create a prototype of a future digital service to support PGM. The tender specifies** the prototype should cover the PGM process end-to-end. We would like to work with the Fund to decide if this is the most valuable approach,** or whether we could have greater impact focusing on specific points in the process that could be significantly improved by digital services.”

This is something to decide together. There are lots of PGM models right now - could (should?) we standardise and codify that as an end-to-end service? What do we mean by end-to-end? Which class of user are we talking about (fund staff? community member? donor? all three?)

That’s it for this week. That’s been a lot of thinking out loud. Let us know what you think.

Paul & Ian