Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and energy last Thursday to the Exploring Participation Workshop 1. For most of the afternoon we used a variation on the Future Workshop method to answer the focus question “How do we envision an ideal participation process for the Your Account Project?”. Everyone worked on their own, then in small groups, and then with the full group to find some of the underlying issues that affect the participation process. The work we did together is captured in a table that identified 12 issues that are part of an ideal participation process: Accountability, Base Camp (i.e. project headquarters), Love & Respect thy Team, Customer Centred, Respect, Practical Vision, Communal Tools, Well-defined Governance, Transparent Communication, Context Awareness, Iterative & Flexible Process, and A Window In. The full table below includes the individual responses that were clustered to identify the 12 high-level issues.
Participatory processes always require compromises and we don’t expect the Your Account project to be ideal. However, we did identify 4 areas of the Your Account project that we would like to work on: Base Camp (i.e. having a project headquarters, co-location, etc.), One Team/One Dream (part of Practical Vision), Well-Defined Governance and Transparent Communication. We also talked about exploring ways to involve library members in a collaborative design role (in addition to in a review role, as we are currently using) on the Your Account project and also about involving them in this research on Exploring Participation. So – lots to consider in the coming weeks within team meetings as well as on the private discussion forum on this site. We’ll keep you posted!