Week 1 - Kick off + reflections

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…. Hang on, is it still? We’ll revisit this at Show and Tell on Wednesday.

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: We got together for kick-off this week! 🎉

• We had a go at ‘designing the box’ together and got a bit clearer on who we think we’re building for (answer: someone wanting to affect change in their community) 🧃
• I began thinking about how we might structure our research 🔎
• I began reaching out to change-makers who might be useful to speak to in user research. ☎️

Longer version:

We came together bright and early on Wednesday for the first time to kick-off the project.

I thought it’d be good to try and ‘design the box’ for our digital tool together. We got some way through the exercise [miro board is here].

The digital tool is for someone looking to make a positive change in their community with others

We spent a while kicking around exactly who this tool is for and on reflection I feel a good, encompassing description is ‘someone looking to make a positive change in their community with others’. This might be a place based community or an issue based community. We want to capture organisations doing ‘best practice’ PGM and grassroots community action. We think this definition helps us do that.

Note: We’re talking about the dreamers and creators working towards positive change (rather than people fighting against something, fixing potholes or returning lost cats).

How the digital tool is framed is going to be important

In the conversations we had during kick-off, we often came back to talking about how we imagined the digital tool being framed. Paul, Bea and I reflected on these discussions and identified four framing principles to guide the work:

1. Change comes from within the community and is done by the community
2. The best outcomes occur within a safe space
3. Change is rooted in hope
4. The community working together is better than any individual

These are clumsy and it’s not about wordsmithing, but they’re a first attempt to offer some principles to guide the work. We’ll revisit as we progress.

What support does a person wanting to make change in their community need?

I think we’d be wise to structure the research around one key question, at risk it sprawls and becomes unwieldy. What support does a person wanting to make change in their community need?

This will allow us to talk to a wider range of community change makers, not just those involved in PGM or community activists. (Reminder: we’re not designing for ‘top-down’, panel based PGM designed by funding bodies.)

It got me thinking about who we want to talk to for user-research:

• Someone who’s successfully started change in their community
• An ‘exemplary’ PGM group, who have come together to support change in their own community
• Someone at Participatory City or Civic Square (or other place shaping initiatives) to find out more about how they support people who want to make change

By asking “what support does a person wanting to make change in their community need?” we will hopefully start to see patterns.

It’d be interesting to talk to people who wanted to make change, but failed, too - but they’re much harder to find.

I anticipate we’ll hear lots of formal, practical stuff - booking meeting rooms, recruiting like minded people, managing newsletters (Paul’s begun brainstorming the practical tasks involved with community change). I hope we might start to surface some of the stuff that falls in the ‘gaps’, but I’m not entirely sure how we’ll use this yet…

We’ll talk more about this research approach in the Show & Tell on Wednesday at 12pm.

See you there!