Originally on Social reporter 15.9.2015
Summary: How we used a cast of fictitious characters and organisations to help a London borough plan its digital participation strategy in the face of austerity cuts.
Over the past few years Drew Mackie and I have used fictitious characters and organisations as the basis for our workshop games, with successful explorations of how digital tech can be used by community enablers, nonprofit consultants, older people and other groups. Recently we've coalesced these into Slipham, a place with all the social and civic challenges that we hope digital tech might help address.
We are using Slipham as the testbed for our Living Lab explorations into how to combine a number of techniques, including network mapping and storytelling as well as games. Recently we were delighted to help Southwark council design a seminar for officers, members and local organisations on digital participation. As part of that we created a new and not-unrealistic scenario:
“The London borough of Slipham faces major cuts, and the council, community and voluntary sectors have decided to form a partnership to explore how greater digital participation could help everyone in tough times. Top priorities, themes and ideas emerging so far include:
To do this a core group of Slipham digital champions are staging a creative planning session that includes some external advisers. They are looking at the assets in Slipham that could be better used, and networks that could be further developed. They are also researching innovations elsewhere. Some 60 people spent two hours working on the challenge in groups.
You'll find a full report of the workshop here. In planning the workshop we used the card-based organising system Trello, and afterwards I loaded up all the workshop materials.
Trello is a terrific, free system for organising anything. Imagine a virtual wall of Post-it notes - but with scope to add images, links, checklists, discussions on the back. You can keep boards personal and private, make them public, or use in a team. Here's a few bookmarks about using Trello.
I'm exploring two further developments with Trello:
Huge thanks to Kevin Dykes, Cara Pottinger and Southwark colleagues for the opportunity to run the game, and joining so enthusiastically in designing and helping run the session. We'll be staying in touch as workshop participants and others develop projects triggered by the session, and other work Southwark is doing.
Previously: