This is the second blog post in a series spotlighting the newest workshop series from the Community Solutions Network program. For this initiative, Open North is launching three new Communities of Practice and an online collaboration forum. These communities are composed of civil servants and Indigenous leaders from towns, cities, or regions all across Canada. Over the course of several months, Open North will support participants as they develop their projects using data and technology for the common good. By joining, participants will receive tailored and in-depth resources that contribute to tangible outcomes while benefiting from collaboration in a larger network of peers – all at no cost to participants. The program is funded by Infrastructure Canada, and is offered as a component of a larger open smart cities program led by Evergreen Canada.
Gathering everyone together for the first time is definitely one of the more challenging parts of launching a public-facing, community-engaging project because you never know quite what to expect. After months of preparation, long meetings thinking and rethinking our strategy and many, many hours spent talking to participants to gauge their needs and develop relevant content, we finally conducted our first introductory workshop of the Communities of Practice series! We opened the (virtual) doors and were greeted by 24 attendees from 11 different municipalities, all there to discuss their digital transformation plans and begin learning and collaborating together. However, what had seemed like a good approach on paper turned out to be much harder in practice.
The first workshop was intentionally designed to give the participants space to begin talking about their plans, but also to deliberately take a moment to have participants reassess their thinking. The goal was to create space to pause and reconsider their plans. We had developed exercises designed to think through problem definitions systematically and to take a critical look at their digital capacities in the post-pandemic era. Our plan was to briefly teach core methods we use at Open North to assess issues, and then pivot and get our participants to use them too. This didn’t quite work out as well as we hoped.
We heard many participants talk about how their digital transformation plans had been disrupted by the pandemic, and how new directions had to be adopted rapidly as the emergency unfolded. Yet moving from the descriptive to the analytical steps proved harder. Expecting people to quickly grasp and apply a brand new theoretical tool 30 minutes into the first workshop was too much to ask. That said, the participants were eager to discuss their experiences, and the conversation took off from there. We explored shared tensions between the need to react quickly and how emergencies can catalyze swift change, and the growing sense post-pandemic that new challenges around resources and priorities had arisen as a result.
As a result of the only partial success of this exercise, we have reconfigured how the exercises in the second workshop will work. Instead of conveying and then applying an abstract analytical framework, we will begin with an extensive free-flowing conversation about the projects and their envisioned solutions that the participants have brought to the CoP. The goal here is to get a deeper sense of what everyone is working on, and then move from there in a series of structured steps to a discussion about the best methods to assess the fit of the solution. We hope that this will provide a better opportunity for everyone to get to know each other’s work without first having to grapple with an analytical exercise, and then ease into a practical conversation about ends and means.
Launching a community of practice for municipalities working on digital transformation is a complex endeavour at the best of times, and the tail end of a pandemic is certainly not the best of times. It is, however, an interesting time: there are so many different angles, projects, approaches and levels of advancement involved – and this complexity is exactly why we chose this project: municipalities are grappling with many different issues and ideas, yet frequently they encounter similar problems and explore solutions. This is where we see a Community of Practice being the most impactful: bringing everyone together to share their learning and support one another, rather than working through this in silos.
As much as we are here to support municipalities in working through their projects and in collaborating with one another, we are also learning how to best provide this support when people are still in crisis mode, stretched thin and under-resourced, and grappling with a massive influx in new technologies that promise all kinds of solutions. In our quest to provide the best support to municipalities in these times of immense upheaval, we too are grappling with these issues and iterating upon our strategies. In this period of recovery amidst an ongoing pandemic, how much are municipal participants able/willing to contribute to their peers? How do we ensure that participants are receiving value through these peer-to-peer interactions?
Participants have brought many different digital transformation plans to the program, from AI risk assessment tools to Open Data Evaluation plans, new procurement strategies, and digital literacy partnerships, and much more. One of the goals of this workshop series is to harness that innovative energy, but also to step back from the crisis response mode and think again about the nature of the issues facing us, and the kinds of solutions that best fit our needs.
After the workshop we provided a Digital Capacity Assessment tool to help participants work through their strengths and identify opportunities for further investment. We also opened up the Slack community space and provided everyone with the opportunity to work through a short challenge statement exercise to introduce themselves and their projects online. This is where more in-depth conversation will be fostered in the spaces between workshops, giving participants the opportunity to connect with one another, pose questions, and collaborate further. We also welcome new participants and those who’d like more information to join the Slack space as well and get involved in the conversations!
In the next workshop, set for October 12, we will move from a general overview into the specifics of everyone’s projects and begin exchanging and collaborating in earnest. The workshop will provide all participants plenty of space to describe their projects and start identifying connections with one another. The goal will be to work through the solutions participants have in mind together, and think about what kinds of research, capacity and support that may be necessary to achieve them. This will provide the foundation for ongoing collaboration between projects to co-develop solutions! With this rich array of municipalities and projects we can only imagine it will be a very fruitful workshop indeed.