Creating inclusive communities of practice

6 Jun

At the start of 2022 Consequential, The Data Place, DOT PROJECT and Noisy Cricket came together to explore the possibilities for mapping the ethical technology ecosystem across the UK. In this blog we share our learnings, and invite you to get involved.

This project was funded by Bristol + Bath Creative R+D, and as part of this work we wanted to build, uncover and share a consensus picture of the organisations, networks and projects working in this space to:

make it more accessible to those needing support
make it more collaborative for those working in it
help funders target support better
ease the way for new entrants into the sector

Before we interrogated the accessibility of these spaces, we needed to define them. For the purpose of our work, we defined ethical technology infrastructure as a process where people were put first ‘when it comes to the creation and deployment of technology, and thinking holistically about the impact of the tech digital solutions we create and use on communities, society and the environment too.’

A community of practice was defined as: ‘a community of practice is a gathering of individuals motivated by the desire to cross organisational boundaries, to relate to one another, and to build a body of actionable knowledge through coordination and collaboration.’ - World Bank Group

UNDERSTANDING A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

To research this community of practice, we have been collating and reviewing existing data and background from previous mapping projects across the partnership, exploring the existing practices and behaviours which have been used to create Communities of Practice, prototyping data visualisations and exploring feedback mechanisms across diverse groups of people.

We are sharing our story so far with the hope of starting to build that Community of Practice - and inviting a wider group of contributors to join us in a new phase of purpose mapping, to firm up the end goals of the community of practice, before developing a collective community of practice proposal for funding further product or service development.

MAKING THE ETHICAL TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM MORE ACCESSIBLE TO THOSE NEEDING SUPPORT

One of our first conversations was around the issue of inclusion. Put simply, if a “closed” group conducts a mapping exercise according to who they know, the results of this will also be “closed” and therefore of limited use. To address this our focus for this project became researching and prototyping together an inclusive community of practice to explore who is and is not represented within the sector currently and who we hope to be inclusive towards. Our assumption was that this could shape the effort and ensure the relevance and usefulness of any mapping that is subsequently done.

We investigated how to design strong foundations for an inclusive community of practice that will develop a unified approach to ecosystem mapping of ethical technology across the UK. As part of this we sought to understand the practices and principles we can put in place to build the foundations of an inclusive community of practice, how to communicate and engage with people inclusively to build a community of practice, and the benefits of a community of practice to support ethical technology ecosystem mapping from the perspective of stakeholders.

OUR APPROACH

MAPPING KEY PLAYERS IN THE ECOSYSTEM

Our discovery work began with a review of the data from previous mapping projects we had been involved in. The visual representation and early prototype visualisations of this data is available in this slide deck. This discovery work revealed a draft set of key stakeholder groups.

CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND SECONDARY NEEDS

Alongside the mapping work, we derived a set of draft needs and identified relevant contextual data, such as the numbers of tech companies in each region (broken down by SIC code and other types) from Companies House, the attributes of locations and areas such as rurality and administrative boundaries, as well as key demographics from the ONS. These datasets might be useful for comparing how networks and communities of practice emerge differently in different types of areas.

We surfaced the following needs from the previous case studies and discussion among the group:

People who need to access support should be able to navigate the industry quickly -Who is available, near me, and has experience with this particular problem space
People working in the sector need to know what projects are happening - What initiatives and projects exist? How can I get involved?
Funders need to know where the gaps are in support provision - Which problem spaces are not being worked on right now? What types of organisations need to be involved?
New entrants to the sector want to know who is who rapidly and easily - What organisations are working on the same things as me? How do I find them? How do I join them?

SENSEMAKING A WAY FORWARD

We held a collective session amongst our organisations on what we need to consider in relation to inclusion. Through this process we asked ourselves about definitions of inclusion, reviewed other Communities of Practice initiatives and collated resources from a range of sources. This led to a set of guiding questions which frame the lenses through which we are exploring inclusion:

How do I find out about your community?
How do I attend one of your meetings or events?
What day of the week, what time of day do your events happen?
What do your events involve? (physical activity, public speaking, speed networking)
Where are your events? Can I get there by public transport? How far do I have to travel?
Does anybody in your group look like me, come from the same place as me, or share my perspective?
How do I join your group? What are the criteria?
What tools do you use to advertise events and membership? Can I access these with assistive technology?
What accessibility standards do you apply to your slides, documents and web pages?

Now we want to engage a wider group and test our assumptions.

Through this analysis phase we identified a set of resources containing a number of articles and publications aimed at building more inclusive communities of practice and/or ethical technology considerations. These have been added to the Dot Insight resource library here.

We then reviewed how each of the previous initiatives had gone about data collection and categorisation. Based on this research we have drawn some interim conclusions we now want to test with a broader community:

General

Communities of practice (COP) are always a delicate balance between centralisation and decentralisation/democratic approaches; without someone driving they can lose momentum or meaning, but without opportunities to input they can not be meaningful for members
COPs need to have a purpose and a value exchange between members; otherwise they become talking chambers. It is worth considering how formal or not the COP is as a form of value; for example being a member of the RSA comes with prestige along with other benefits
COPs need to help build relationships; but this is where inclusion can become tricky because relationships are often based on shared social norms and expectations, which people of different backgrounds may not share
Community building happens purposefully and serendipitously and there have to be spaces for both to happen

Practical

Where a COP has events (remote or in person) it’s useful to make a note of who attends and who doesn’t and to gather any and all feedback about issues or challenges that made the events less valuable, or less easy to contribute to.
This might lead to interventions like provision of a creche, adding child-friendly areas, changing the times meetings were held or providing food, or providing a community manager, to name just a few
Terminology

There is a difference between 'community' and 'community of practice' - we need to be cognisant of this in our external communication

Enabling factors

Having a coordinator - this role should be neutral in this community, and be a paid role (perhaps for and by the community). A paid role usually comes with a clear role and set of responsibilities
Set up in a context where there is not much competition
Enabling different ways to engage with a community: e.g. the importance of tooling - taking an inclusive approach to a) the tools you use and b) how they are used
Sense of shared governance and consent decision making and practices in place to practically do this - e.g. consent based decision making, data collaboratives, co-designed resources
Reflective practices - build, test, learn, and measure - constant review and iteration, spaces for the members to contribute and reflect
Importance of onboarding & welcoming new community members

Challenges

Value exchange & impact - the community brings value to its members and being clear what the value is, front and centre - within the context of sharing and learning

Understanding the implication of using certain tools eg. Slack
Considering how to avoid hidden hierarchy
Communities of Practice would benefit from more diversity - this feels quite challenging
CoP will thrive from diversity bringing wider learning, diverse thinking - however a stable inclusivity may not be attainable, and the best we might wish for is a constant level of change and movement in the network.

PURPOSE MAPPING WORKSHOP

Our final step for this work was a facilitated Purpose Mapping session to test some of these ideas, gather new ones, and synthesise the purposes people might have from mapping the ethical technology sector. We explored how we might align on the purpose of bringing together a Community of Practice around ‘ethical technology mapping’, and understand the wider interest around the purpose of the Community of Practice with a broader community.

An open invite brought around 15 participants together to a facilitated workshop led by Simon from The Data Place.

On the horizon we collectively visioned:

An openly accessible initial ethical tech map (OR taxonomy only for feedback) with clear tight boundaries - however early stage just share and iterate
A "maturity model" and assessment framework for ethical tech
An exploration of maintenance - Who maintains this and how to change the map according to shifts in focus of ethical tech?
Initial governance structure exploration and pilot - what would map governance look like?

For now we are on pause as we seek further opportunities to prototype together.