Week 2 - Recruiting for research, narrowing focus

Posted by Paul Fawkesley on Wednesday 14 April 2021

[How’s this?] We’re exploring the question: How might tech support communities to carry out collective decision-making and collective design?

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 started recruiting for user research (2 groups: PGM practitioners, community change-makers)
  • We had a lively Show and Tell, and narrowed the project focus towards **collective decision-making **and collective design.

Longer version:

Recruiting for user research

We started the week by shortlisting some people we’d like to interview. We divided this into two groups: PGM practitioners and change-makers (clumsy phrase. hmm.)

Speaking to PGM practitioners

We want to listen to at least 3 PGM practitioners - funds that already practice participatory grant-making.

This will help us spot patterns in - the stages they go through, and help us get into the practical aspects of it - deliberation, voting, distributing grants, etc. We also want to listen to what additional support the PGM fund offers to a community beyond money.

The output of these interviews will be two types of Journey Map:

  1. The journey of a “panelist” - someone with lived experience, invited to help design the fund and select what applications get funded.
  2. The journey of someone applying to a fund (a change-maker)

(Ian had a go at a draft journey map for Camden Giving - it has more questions than answers at the moment.)

Throughout, we’ll be keeping an eye out for opportunities where tech might support the process.

Speaking to change-makers

We also want to speak to at least 5 change-makers - people and communities that do the actual work of improving the world (and are sometimes grantees, but not always).

From this group, we want to learn:

  • What support do you need?
  • What would make it way easier to run your organisation?
  • What do you really not like doing?
  • What do you wish your org could do more of?

We made a shortlist, noting down why we felt each group was interesting, and made contact. That resulted in 3 interviews already - always a relief when recruiting for research!

Show and Tell: We narrowed the focus

We did the first of our fortnightly Show and Tell sessions to the Lottery team. These are a great practice to regularly check in and ensure we’re all on the same page. (Much better than beavering away for 12 weeks and delivering the finished project, only to find it’s gone way off course.)

Even as we presented the research plan and the people we’re contacting, we felt the tension between the two groups we want to interview. The change-makers we shortlisted are fab, but are we being massively too broad with what we’re trying to learn?

PGM funds and change-makers are very different - what brings them together? Is this two separate pieces of work?

Recall that last week, we said the central question is:

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

That’s an honourable question, but it’s too big.

After some helpful discussion we agreed to narrow the scope and focus on those organisations doing collective decision-making and collective-design.

We believe the most interesting communities are those that have worked out to co-operate, do things together, disagree constructively, decide together what they want and how to achieve it.

With that in mind, we tweaked our shortlist of change-makers, filtering through a lens of those doing collective decision-making. We approached a few new organisations where collective decisions are fundamental - for example Citizens Assemblies, community-owned businesses (co-ops, community benefit societies), neighbourhood associations, that sort of thing.

(Aside: in doing so, we came across mySociety’s excellent-at-first-glance Digital Tools For Citizens’ Assemblies publication.)

This narrower focus feels helpful. It’s overwhelming thinking about all the ways change-makers could be supported. And it links nicely back to PGM, which has collective decision making at its core.

In a world of big challenges and often divisive and ineffective decision-making, it feels important and valuable to think about tools for co-operation, consensus-building and thoughtful deliberation. Exciting!

That leads us back to the tagline at the start of the weeknote - what do you think?

How might tech support communities to carry out collective decision-making and collective design?