A couple of weeks ago, we had our second Community of Practice (CoP) workshop. Initially, I had conceptualized this blog as a kind of hot take coming right on the heels of each exciting event, but Workshop #2 was so rich with collaboration, and the one-on-one ‘office hours’ conversations we had with various participants contained so many budding ideas, that we got the whole Community Solutions Network team together last Thursday to properly digest and plan. This third blog post is one of a series of responses to this impressively generative workshop.
As you can read on the Slack channel, the participants in both breakout rooms discussed each other’s projects in considerable detail and there was quite a range of different approaches, issues, barriers, and levels of progress amongst them. However, two themes stood out, which are deeply representative of the overarching structure and goal of this CoP program.
The first theme was the need to effectively engage and involve both internal and external stakeholders in the development and execution of a digital transformation strategy. Participants like the City of Saskatoon, York Region, and Durham Region discussed their experiences working through establishing an effective governance structure for such a strategy: what organisation is best positioned to lead it? What governance structure should be in place to ensure that all voices are included? The Cities of Kelowna and Calgary provided some excellent feedback to these questions. Kelowna spoke to how starting with an issue that affected the whole region – flooding – enabled them to build a strong network across jurisdictions that then served as a platform for further projects. In Calgary, they explained how they had collaborated with Calgary Economic Development – which does not report to the city administration – and so created the space to build relationships with organizations and vendors to pursue their Living Labs project.
The City of Toronto is working through how to introduce an Indigenous Data Sovereignty strategy to their digital transformation and thereby respect ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP) principles in Indigenous communities. Their project in the CoP is also around stakeholder engagement and the difficulty of building out a network of collaborators on the topic and so to chart a way for all municipalities to better engage with OCAP. In response to this difficulty around building topic-specific working groups, the cities of Ottawa and Calgary describe their learnings from establishing the G4+ group to discuss issues around open data projects.
The City of Kelowna then spoke of the difficulty of building resident engagement and buy-in for new projects. They have been working to establish a digital literacy program to help people acquire the skills to access government services online, an area that has grown dramatically during the pandemic. This too is, in part, an issue of stakeholder involvement, just on the user side. Digital transformation may be inevitable, but it needs to be done in such a way that all members of the population are brought along and can benefit from it. So how does one construct a strategy that also supports and includes those most likely to be left out? Calgary described their efforts to teach digital literacy in creative ways that would be more likely to engage such groups, rather than just relying on arguments of efficiency or technological progress.
In all of these fruitful conversations, the difficulty of stakeholder engagement internally and externally was discussed from different angles. It was clear that the participants all had significant insight and expertise to offer one another, and the time available in the workshop wasn’t nearly sufficient to do it justice. As a result, we have decided to host a topic-specific workshop we’re calling a ‘focus session’ (thank you to Darrell Bridges for the name suggestion!) on stakeholder engagement on September 23rd. In this session, all who are interested can come together and we will facilitate a structured discussion to work through specific questions and solutions brought up by the participants. The goal is to go beyond discussion and to end the session with tangible, actionable plans for stakeholder engagement that each participant can take back and begin using.
The second key theme that came from this workshop is the growing realization across all digital transformation projects that they need to think more deeply about the values that guide the projects as principles and, concretely, the value the projects produce as outcomes. Procuring a piece of technology to attempt to solve an immediate project has often created more risk and harm than good as a result of unforeseen systemic or knock-on effects. Digital transformation strategies need to start with clearly established values in order to assess different courses of action. However, determining these values is also a community effort. It too requires collaboration and community engagement to arrive at an approach that works for everyone.
The City of Saskatoon explained how they had taken a step back from their digital transformation strategy to take the time to think through the question of values. It was only once such a set of guiding values had been established that they could begin thinking about how to align the various projects they had. This parallels the City of Toronto’s Indigenous Data Sovereignty project, as this too is a fundamentally values-driven endeavour. Yet the complex part is bringing the relevant communities and stakeholders together to decide what the values mean in operational terms, and how to then implement them!
The G4+ group, represented by Calgary and Ottawa, is engaged in a very similar project. They are trying to develop a framework to measure the impact of open data beyond the old metrics of uploads and downloads. They are also interested in value: by what values should one measure impact? What values of impact are desirable? With what metrics can and should they be measured? These too are difficult questions and require collaborative work to decide upon.
As a result of this theme’s obvious importance, we have decided to conduct a focus session on the topic of values, impact, and measurement as well on September 30th. It too will be open to all who are interested in strategies and methods for establishing what values are important to a project, how to incorporate them, and ways to measure whether the project is having an impact commensurate with those values or not. Both of these focus sessions will be held in the last 10 days of November. The third workshop will follow a week thereafter, on December 7th. Dates to be announced soon!
Finally, on a related note, both of these themes are at the very heart of Open North’s newly updated approach to data governance. After years of watching the field develop we have come to the conclusion that global discourse on data governance needs to evolve to more explicitly and pragmatically include community engagement and values at its very core. We will be launching an online learning module on this approach to data governance as well as a blog series describing our thinking in detail at the upcoming Canadian Open Data Summit on November 8! We look forward to engaging with you and all the other amazing participants at the Summit.