We can change how organisations make decisions about data
We’re developing practical guidance to help organisations adopt open, collective decision making
We are learning from and applying existing experience in public participation to data decisions
Involve is the UK’s leading public participation charity. They develop, support and campaign for new ways to involve people in decisions that affect their lives.
They maintain a comprehensive catalog of different public participation methods along with their costs, strengths and weaknesses.
We’re helping organisations pick appropriate approaches
Techniques that work in one situation or for one kind of organisation might not work for another – it depends on…
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governance
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expertise
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We’re cultivating a community of tech workers who use participatory approaches
Running collective decision-making processes will be an essential skill on any team
For the Integrity Institute, the label “integrity worker” applies to a broad swath of employees working on safety. Their site reads, “If you have experience tackling any of these things on behalf of a social network, you’re probably an integrity worker.” They go on to list ethical design, hate speech, disinformation, toxicity, spam, and more than a dozen other areas.
We’re running pilots and developing case studies
We are developing an evidence base to learn from experience and inspire organisations to change their practices
In 2020, the Wellcome Trust commissioned OTT Consulting to recommend the best approach for enabling public engagement communities to share and gather evidence on public engagement practice globally, and in particular to assess the suitability of an approach adapted from the UK ‘What Works Centres’. This report is the output from that commission. It draws from a desk-based literature review, workshops in India, Peru and the UK, and a series of stakeholder interviews with international organisations.
The key themes that emerged from stakeholder interviews and workshops were that, in order for evidence about public engagement to help inform and shape public engagement practice, and for public engagement to be used and deployed effectively, there has to be an approach that can: understand the audiences, broaden out how ‘evidence’ is understood and generated, think strategically about how evidence affects and informs practice and understand the complexity of the system dynamics within which public engagement (and evidence about public engagement) operates.
Projects
We worked with Create Gloucestershire, Active Gloucestershire and Barnwood Trust to organise a one-day county-based conference exploring how data can work better for local communities.
CONNECTED BY DATA was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to improve their understanding of the current landscape and stakeholders they want to support, work with, influence and inspire as they create a new insight and analysis infrastructure to help improve how the ecosystem understands inequalities, and how to solve them.
Connected by Data was been commissioned by Justice Lab (a special initiative of the Legal Education Foundation) to conduct an evaluation of the public deliberation exercise that led to the report Justice Data Matters: Building a public mandate for court data use in order to surface lessons for similar future exercises within and outside the UK justice system.