Designing Distributed Community Participation

Supporting Accessibility, Inclusivity and Safeguarding

Remote and online engagement has broadened the scope of participatory practices and allows new audiences to be reached. However, this widened horizon brings new ethical considerations around accessibility and inclusivity; recognising that these approaches can contribute towards digital exclusion.

Use asynchronous and remote engagement to offer flexibility and choice:
Remote and synchronous engagement (for example, video conferencing and phone calls) offer participants more flexibility to attend sessions due to reduced travel requirements and increased ability to negotiate schedules. However, this also relies on the flexibility of the facilitator and their ability to dialogue with participants in advance and adapt activities to meet individual needs. Remote and asynchronous engagement (for example, physical workbooks and shared digital spaces like Miro or Google Docs), enables people to participate in their own time, which is more accessible for those with scheduling commitments during traditional working hours (such as caring responsibilities).

Supporting accessibility:
Accessibility requires designing forms of engagement that meet participants’ individual needs. As accessibility needs can greatly vary however, an engagement approach or method designed for one person may be less accessible for another. The attributes and benefits of distributed engagement include providing extended time for people to engage asynchronously; providing flexibility to engage around individual time commitments; and being able to tailor approaches. This can be described as ‘meeting people on their own terms’ or becoming ‘participant-centred’. Time should be factored in to mediate potential barriers to participation. The individualised nature of accessibility requirements means that to design for everyone requires plurality and the creation of multiple options (for example, running multiple sessions in different formats, having varying levels of participation within the same activity, or providing different variety in methods and resources for participants to choose from). Tailored remote and asynchronous engagement approaches can also provide participants with more time to prepare, digest information and contribute their thoughts and ideas (which is not always afforded in synchronous online engagement).

Shifting perceptions around ‘communities of place’: 
Asynchronous and distributed engagement has brought people from diverse geographical areas together in novel ways. This could be shaping how we (re)consider communities and who we recruit for participation; rethinking recruitment frameworks and our definitions of ‘place’ altogether. Cultural biases and assumptions could still be preventing truly broad inclusion despite increased remote access for distributed geographical locations. For example, this might involve excluding people from rural or remote locations due to historic low awareness and limited access to appropriate recruitment networks. This poses the questions around what support is needed to involve new and diverse audiences and how do we ethically search for the previously unknown? With this comes a need for increased sensitivities when bringing together multi-cultural and multi-locational perspectives. Additionally, as perspectives have been shifted to distributed communities, it is important not to completely replace place-based audiences and local engagement that benefits from on-the-ground and co-located methods.

Embedding principles of hospitality within virtual engagement:
Hospitality principles, typically adopted for in-person participatory events, have also been applied during virtual engagement to emulate safe, comfortable, and welcoming online environments. In some cases, this has involved creating a ‘group charter’ to establish boundaries and recreate the benefits of co-located engagement, such as posting refreshments out to participants alongside paper-based welcome packs. In other cases, facilitators have attempted to recreate literal representations of physical places within a digital platform. There are opportunities to further question what a comfortable digital or hybrid space looks and feels like, and invite health and wellbeing experts to explore this alongside participatory practitioners.

Engaging from home creates new ethical considerations:
There is a need to recognise that not everyone’s home space is as safe, comfortable, or appropriate to work from as others, and often it is unclear what additional responsibilities or constraints this creates for participants (for example, if a participant is caring for someone at home or experiencing mental health difficulties). It is important to recognise that not everyone has had the same experience of distributed engagement throughout the course of the pandemic or previous to that. This includes their cultural and technical experience, and introduction to digital tools or etiquette. Acknowledging the discomfort of the pandemic as a context and recognising this as a new way of working is recommended to create safe spaces that foster empathy and human connection.

More time needs to be offered to get people ‘on the same page’:
When engaging digitally, participants may have varying levels of experience and knowledge. This means that more time should be factored in at the start for participants to set-up and become familiar with any new digital tools and resources and be supported with any project ‘onboarding’ or upskilling processes. However this must be balanced with people’s desire and capacity to participate digitally. Capacity-building, when sought, is best delivered through extended and slow engagement over longer periods of time with attention paid to the participants’ desired pace.

Fostering dialogue, deliberation and feedback within engagement:
To ensure facilitators of distributed synchronous engagement do not become digital gatekeepers, methods that combat the mono-directional nature of video conferencing conversations should be developed. This can include using breakout rooms and parallel asynchronous tools to allow participants to engage at their own pace and support multiple diverse conversations simultaneously. Regardless of the methods used, some participants feel less able to speak openly via digital platforms than in physical environments and this should be recognised and addressed to ensure equal representation. Facilitators using synchronous digital platforms such as video conferencing tools often struggle to ‘read the room’ or assess the live needs of participants due to ‘digital silence’: when cameras and mics are turned off and participant feedback is not recognised. This can make it particularly difficult for facilitators to know the level of engagement that is being achieved and adapt to people’s needs in-the-moment. 

Designing Digital/hybrid Experiences and the Value of Creativity

As in-person participation slowly becomes more available to us, those who design and facilitate engagement activities are faced with yet more options, methods, platforms, and tools to support participation. With this ever-changing context also comes the ability to develop new blended and hybrid models of engagement. By reflecting back upon the lessons learned from distributed engagement and the accessibility gaps still to be filled, considerations about how to continue expanding engagement for the future have been identified.

Connections between participants and facilitators may become less formal:
Slower and more informal ways of connecting with and between participants has been favoured by participants throughout this research, such as providing ‘drop in’ conversations, phone calls, or online chat spaces such as WhatsApp. This way of engaging creates more space to foster trust and longer-term relationships, and to develop an understanding of participants’ needs to inform subsequent bespoke participatory methods. However, the ethics of this approach must provide participants with space and opportunities to opt out. Informal engagement therefore needs to be effectively safeguarded and have expectations managed of both researchers and participants roles.

Prioritising participant ownership and agency:
Digital engagement can reduce participants’ sense of agency and ownership within participatory processes and the directions taken. This is often because, as well as reducing opportunities for live feedback and therefore live adaption, remote methods can remain rigidly bound to the constraints of the platforms used. The amount of time required to prepare for remote participatory engagement can lead to methods becoming rigid and over-designed. When expanding engagement towards hybridity, there is an opportunity to further enable and expand participant ownership and involvement within the design of engagement mechanisms. Approaches that reduce the barriers to co-ownership include involving participants in co-investigator/ researcher roles, establishing ethical considerations together, and moving beyond transactional and extractive engagement altogether. The desire for participant co-ownership has been accelerated by remote and distributed engagement and should be considered as a fundamental principle towards supporting inclusivity, capacity-building and impact.

Remote and distributed engagement has questioned how we value resources:
Project budgets that were typically assigned to catering, venue hiring, and travel during in-person engagements have been reallocated throughout the pandemic. At times, distributed engagement has proven to be more affordable and cost effective. However, this way of valuing the resources required to conduct participation should be carefully considered. As we continue to seek high quality, diverse and accessible participation, there is an opportunity to reassign value. For example, diverse and hybrid participation has demonstrated that the following activities should be more highly valued and resourced: longer lead-in times are needed to develop nuanced and context-led tools; the ways in which we reimburse or pay for participants’ time should be
re-evaluated; more resources can be allocated to support accessibility through providing appropriate tools and training; slower and extended engagements that suit the schedules of participants may require increased time allocation.

Hybrid engagement presents increased complexity and a need for increased capacity:
As we move towards hybrid participation (analogue and digital, synchronous and asynchronous, distributed and local), it is likely that a plurality of engagement methods and formats will be required to meet the preferences and accessibility needs of diverse participants. This way of working may increase workloads for facilitators, particularly as they return to co-located workplace environments. There are opportunities to further investigate what preparations are required to support participatory practitioners during this transition and as they begin re-engaging in increasingly hybrid ways. Likewise, frameworks that analyse the impact and value of engagement methods and their qualities, such as Broadley’s ‘Methodological Typology for Distributed Research’ (2020), may be used in the future to support practitioners with decision-making in the design and delivery of participation.

The value of creativity within participation remains evident but undefined:
Whilst a majority of those involved in the DDCP project had successfully designed creative engagement with digital tools, these often went beyond digital and synchronous-only mechanisms. In these instances, physical tools, asynchronous space and time and preparation materials were also offered. In parallel, the majority also believed that creativity fuelled more open participation, encouraged divergent thinking, and established trust between participants and facilitators. This suggests that hybridity may increase creative engagement. However more research is required to understand this relationship, how we maintain and create space for hybrid creativity going forwards, and how the value of creativity within participation might be evidenced, measured and evaluated.

Workshop 01: Reflecting on Practice
12th April 2021

The first knowledge exchange workshop kicked off this week for the DDCP project, which brought together a diverse group of practitioners and researchers from across the public and third sectors, education and academia – including NHS 24, Widening Participation at GSA, The Children’s and Young People’s Centre for Justice, Scottish Care, The Centre for Civic Innovation, Central and West Integration Network, and The Glasgow City council. The aim of the first workshop was to collectively reflect on the last 12 months, share key challenges faced and ways in which these were overcome. To prepare for this, we asked participants to bring with them an insightful moment of community participation that took place either before or during the Covid-19 pandemic and to bring a image or artefact that helps to tell their story.

We began the workshop with a group conversation, which was facilitated through an approach the DDCP team have developed called the ‘conga method’. Instead of a facilitator chairing the discussion, this approach encourages participants to draw connections between and across their experiences themselves by ‘joining the conga’. The participants generously shared their stories as well as reflected back their insights and key learnings to the group, which was captured by the team in real-time on Miro:

Underpinning many of the stories was an ethical sensibility (particularly surrounding participation challenges such as inclusivity, accessibility and digital divides), and an emphasis on the positive legacies can be deduced from the pandemic. We discussed the ways in which both our engagement (methods, tools and techniques) and organisational (in how we communicate, recruit participants, collaborate and connect to audiences) practices have been augmented over the last year. In parallel to this, themes and opportunities for action were synthesised, which included:

• the difference in how we dialogue online – broadcasting that can feel mono-directional as opposed to a more dialogical exchange when using platforms such as Zoom or Teams, and feeling comfortable with silences;
• designing effective non-verbal communication –  reflecting on ways of simplifying this and making it more visual;
• ways to support the more informal and organic interactions – being able to follow up on tangents, nuances and picking up on body language, which can be challenging in virtual environments;
• the importance of supporting capacity-building and ownership, and in examples of digital upskilling;
• recalibrating ways we can provide emotional support and enabling connections;
• how we ‘market’ projects in recruitment processes, the importance of story-telling and the role of social media.

Following on from the conga conversation, we used the map to highlight a range of questions to explore in the second workshop – examples of which include how can we recreate tactile, creative activities when we’re not engaging in-person; how do we future-proof hybrid approaches that support a widening of participation as we transition back into in-person and co-located contexts; what is the future of project budgets when freeing up and redirecting what would have previously been spent on travel; and how do we balance ethics with creativity, responsiveness, and perhaps risk taking?

The next knowledge exchange workshop is taking place on Monday 24th May and will be unpacking these questions in more detail as we explore our processes at different stages of engagement.

Workshop 02: Sharing Processes
26 May 2021

This week we had the second knowledge exchange workshop exploring distributed community participation. The DDCP team were delighted to be joined by new members to the network, which included representation from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Centre for Population Health, the Scottish Community Development Centre, Alliance Scotland, Dartington Service Design Lab and New Practice. Building on insights from the previous workshop where the group collectively reflected upon and shared re-orientated approaches and methods; the focus of this second workshop was to unpack practical processes further, with a focus on problematizing the how. To prepare for this, the team spent time synthesising these key reflections into the following 3 core thematics:

Participants were asked to pick one of these areas that resonated with their own  experiences, and to reflect on an approach, process or technique (theirs or someone else’s that has been particularity inspiring) that could help deepen our understanding of participation challenges and potential responses ­– ­structuring their presentations by the following questions:

1. What was the challenge?
2. How did you respond (what worked/ what didn’t?/ what did you need?)
3. What can we learn from this?

Adopting the ‘Conga’ method as before led to a really rich discussion where participants built upon each other’s examples and insights; exploring these thematics through multiple lenses. This included questions around acknowledging that there are different levels of crisis for different people experiencing the same thing and being conscious of this; negotiating the bureaucracy (red tape) and the institutionalisation of participation; the ways in which boundaries and barriers can, in fact, make us more innovative and creative; within participation what are the nuances between consultation, participation and collaboration; what is the future of research ethics, project budgets and participation spaces; and how can we embed hospitality into our approaches and tools so to sustain a more human touch?

Towards the end of the workshop, we were able to identify a range of additional dimensions to consider and calibrate in processes of designing distributed participation:

Reflecting on these future-focused questions and scenarios, the DDCP are now in the process of consolidating these insights into the design of the final knowledge exchange workshop, taking place on Monday 7^th June. For this, the team are also considering ways to effectively disseminate key learnings from this project, beginning work on creating the digital repository of recourses through developing shareable examples and case studies, as well as exploring future opportunities for sustaining this nearly formed network.

Workshop 03: Sharing Processes
8 June 2021

This week we hosted the third and final knowledge exchange workshop in the Designing Distributed Community Participation series. For this final session, the DDCP team designed a more hands-on workshop to explore ways of future-proofing our collective learnings. Based on insights consolidated from across the previous 2 workshops, Workshop 03 centred on a team-based design sprint activity, framed around the following themes and questions:

• The future of ethics (how does hybrid future engagement shape our ethical considerations?)

• The future of resources, roles and values (how do we use future budgets to value hybrid participation in a different way?)

• The future of (hybrid) engagement methods (how do we design future hybrid engagement methods to benefit participation?)

• The future of communication (how does hybrid future engagement shape our communication for participation?)

For this, we began with some theme-based warm-up discussions, which were captured by the facilitators on Miro. Following this, the attendees were spilt into three working groups and given the design sprint brief to respond to as hypothetical creative research teams, which the aim of implemented insights gleaned from the entire knowledge exchange workshop series:

You are invited to bid for £20k for a 6-month project exploring the future of community centres for young people living in the Highlands and in Glasgow. Through participatory approaches, you need to propose how you will engage with young people and key project stakeholders to develop a set of key insights and recommendations for policy.

This project is taking place during a pandemic, so you are required to consider the ethical dimensions of your project, what potential platforms and tools you will employ and how you will allocate the budget.

Key Project Stakeholders:

• • Young People – 15 – 21 year olds
  • Community Centres
  • Youth Workers/Groups
  • Local Councils

The teams spent time quickly prototyping a proposed project plan, approaches and the timeframe using a simple template created on Miro, and were encouraged to reflect on what the key ethical dimensions would be, create a project budget; and to consider a recruitment and communication strategy. Before the teams pitched their proposal to the wider group, evaluation criteria typically used by funders was shared as a baseline for the group to consider who to vote for:

The first proposal, called ‘It’s about me, not you…’ focused on exploring the topic of the brief specifically with young people in the 15-17 age bracket who are differently abled, recruited to the project as co-researchers. So to remove barriers to participation, an application process would be developed to support participants to identify their own participation requirements. The project fieldwork would involve the young people becoming ‘community reporters’ to explore community centres in their local urban/ rural contexts – identifying who is and isn’t using community centres, identifying the tensions and drivers with the aim of producing creative outputs (e.g. vlogs/ films/ creative artefacts). A key ethical consideration problematized by this team were ways in which participants could be remunerated for their time – both financially as well as the opportunity of providing some form of an award or accreditation that formally acknowledges their project contributions.

The second team proposed to develop a collaborative working team to co-define the project challenge, priorities, approach and methods together with the young people; as well as what shaping what the outcomes will be with the aim of developing a framework with and for the young people focused on what they would like to get out of the process (e.g. new skills/ capacity building/ employment/ certification). The team proposed to use the project budget to employ a group of young people as peer-researchers and, using a co-design methodology and hybrid approaches, support knowledge exchange across the rural and urban contexts in the creation of both textual and visual data. A key ethical dimension was creating a non-hierarchical research culture and building structures that would enable the young people to lead, as well as safeguarding in developing trust between and across the groups of young people.

The third proposal, called ‘Youth Pen-Pal Policy’, again explored ways of supporting young people to be recruited as co-researchers in a project prototyping ways to support youth-led policy reform. Through gathering ethnographic insight from the young people on what the key challenges are (e.g. what’s working well/ what’s not); they would be invited to pitch their own ideas to receive an amount of the project budget to fund their projects. Instead of funds being allocated to travel, satellite workshops would be facilitated across the urban and rural contexts and take place over platforms such as Miro and Whatsapp. During these workshops, the young people will be matched with a mentor (e.g. local business owners, community champions, grassroot organisations) to support in the development of their own proposals. The project would also look to develop youth-led panels who would evaluate these pitches and vote on which ideas to allocate the funding to.

The workshop wrapped up the DDCP team sharing the next steps in terms of disseminating the outputs from the 3 workshops in the form of a digital repository, with the potential to also create a material version of this. The attendees were also encouraged to share their feedback and details so to explore opportunities to grow and develop this network in the future as we gradually move into a post-Covid world.

Reflecting on DDCP
Guest Blog Post – Chris Jamieson, Centre for Civic Innovation
24 June 2021

My experience within the DDCP workshops is an inclusive group striving for change and filled with a wealth of information from different partners involved. It’s also humbling to know that a lot of the people have the same challenges that we are all trying to solve which gives a common goal that we can all strive for. The workshops where perfectly time, I have still stolen tips from yourselves with having breaks in-between, which usually I sometimes forget to add in.

The workshops that I attended have made me reflect on the recent practices and has highlighted the importance of constantly looking back at recent work to see what you could improve and taking the learnings for the next project and thank you all for opening that door for myself.

The main points that I highlighted within the early workshops was the power of storytelling and the importance of becoming better communicators since the outbreak of Covid-19 making all of us working from home.

Social media is a large part of our communications at the CCI and we have seen a large increase of engagement from local people and business since the first lockdown and from then we have made it a constant part of our weekly work. By working with the constraints of the social media platforms and turning it to a benefit, it lets us get straight to the point and helps the team breaks down messages into understandable chunks of information that can be easily understood by everyone. By doing this it makes us ask these types of questions: ‘is this is the best way to say this?’ ‘does this make sense?’ ‘what do you get from this?’ This iteration is crucial to develop the ideas and making sure we are getting the message across simply and effectively.

The idea of sending over a play and follow guide simply does not work anymore, we need to dive deep and find what are we trying to achieve? and how are we going to achieve it? From the outset of a workshop or meeting, we have to be outcome focused. Facilitation has become more than running workshops and making it go smoothly, it is also to make sure that the remote session is simple to perform without having a seasoned facilitator managing the workshop. At the CCI we had co-designed briefs for the ‘Design school in Pollok’,  which was shared over socials channels and we got feedback from a teacher from one primary schools that got involved asking if we can we make the briefs easier to understand for the children, so they can grasp the tasks easily and so the teacher can run the session themself.

We had to reimagine what the briefs where asking, so the children can understand the task at hand and the teacher can run the workshop on their own with ease. The first step we took was making the briefs tell a story with the visuals and making the language we used simple as possible. After we made the changes we heard back from multiple schools wanting to get involved from see seeing the great work that was produced from that one class on social media by the teacher, and word spread. This highlights that we need to become better communicators by constantly asking why? The power of iteration to make the message you trying to commutated understandable to everyone and not only to a sole target market.