This week has been about coordinating, planning and scheduling events and online discussions.
During a planning meeting for the Data Literacy Consortium with Heather Leson from IFRC and Katelyn Rogers and Lisa Petersen from The Centre for Humanitarian Data, we scheduled the next check-in meeting for March 10th. During the past check-ins, we’ve crowdsourced topics for more in-depth discussion, while this has been fruitful, it’s been slightly chaotic. This time we’re wanting to learn how participants are adapting existing data literacy resources.
The next Network-Centric Resources Online Discussion is scheduled for March 12th at 11:00 Eastern when we will be co-creating a list of indicators for success for network-centric resources. How do we know if we are sharing ownership, enabling contribution and supporting collaboration? The idea for this came during the last online discussion on Sustainability from Ashley Fowler, Internews, who has agreed to be on hand to lead a small group. Also grateful to Bob Gradeck, Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center and Liz Hynes, The Narrative Initiative who have agreed to lead small groups. Of course, it’s all about measuring people power – so excited to see heroes Mob Lab publish there report on Measuring People Power:
The Workshop Lab will be at Better Bankside on March 26th. It’s been over a year and a half since I’ve run a stand-alone workshop under the FabRiders banner. Grateful to Tin Geber for the inspiration. I have a ToT workshop that helps people think through delivering a workshop, and of course, all the work assisting facilitators in providing practical workshop sessions at MozFest. Along with securing the venue this week, I also did a quick revue on ticketing/event apps to figure out which would do best for this and ended up going back to Eventbrite – last time I had tried to PayPal, but it fell short as a ticketing app. I never approach these workshops as ways to make money, but an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and connect with people I otherwise wouldn’t. I do hope to break even on costs, though. Early bird tickets are currently on sale.
Speaking of Tin Geber, had a lovely catch up chat with him where we started to unpack the state of civic tech tools and how they can be successful. Of course, there’s a big uphill battle with funding usually secured until launch and a resource-scarcity mindset in the social change sector. Still, there’s more success than there was ten years ago.
I finalised a draft agenda for a Strategy Implementation Retreat with Open Rights Group happening next week in London. Grateful to work with them again after running a retreat for them in May 2019. They hope to begin running these retreats every couple of months, so I’m hoping we can develop a self-reflective framework during this retreat, that they can start using it to measure progress and capture learning.
Continuing work on the campaign toolkit with The Restart Project on Right to Repair brought insights into the politics of translation. Seems translating into Catalan is much appreciated by the Catalonians, while the Dutch are less bothered about translation. The petition for the right to repair your smartphone is already at 14,000. We started the week at 3,000. Sent a query out on the eCampaigning Forum list for examples of co-created campaign toolkits and responses included this inspiring toolkit from Dance4Life.
And listening to:
My Bloody Valentine – Soon (Andrew Weatherall Mix)