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This week I had several conversations about tech-enabled approaches to capture voice at scale. Most of these
approaches are tackling the challenge of capturing ideas, thoughts, sentiments or perspectives from a large number of people, rapidly. Some have been used primarily for market research, but are moving into social, policy and education spaces, capturing perspectives on social issues or topics for civic engagement (such as Remesh*, ThoughtExchange*, and ReinvetED* - a K-12 focused initiative by GovLab). These tools are exciting and present great possibilities, but they also gave me pause.
In some of the conversations where these tools were mentioned, there was a temptation to conflate this type of “listening” with actually hearing and then taking action based on what was learned.
Let me say more. There is a difference between involving people and actually taking action on what they have to say. One example highlighting the gap between seeking input and acting on it, is in the story of community engagement fatigue in Globeville-Eliria-Swansea
neighborhood in Denver, Colorado**.
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Take a look at The Ladder of Citizen Participation (image to the left) developed by Sherry Arnstein, and the Spectrum of Public Participation from the International Association for Public Participation (link below). These models highlight the difference between informing, consulting, delegating and ceding control when it comes to who holds the power to ask the questions and act on the answers.
These tech tools, while offering great promise, only take us so far into the realm of citizen power and true agency in
making change within communities. We are calling on organizations to shift their practice, and collectively advance further action towards a more community-empowered state. To learn more on how to continue your organization’s journey toward inclusive and community-powered data use, join us in our Inclusive Data Workshop on
May 25.
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TOOLS
- *Remesh – Platform that hosts live conversations with up to 1,000 people at once. It uses AI to analyze and organize the audience’s responses in real-time, helping enable organizations to make research-driven decisions faster
- *ThoughtExchange- Tool that uses crowdsourcing to turn meaningful discussions into insightful data
- *ReinventED: Your Education, Your Voice – Tool to amplify the voices of students, parents and caregivers and educators in identifying challenges with today’s education
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LET'S CONNECT
If you would like to contribute to content or would like us to include your resources in the future, please reach out to info@resultslab.org and we will connect with you!
For more resources and updates, follow ResultsLab on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
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ResultsLab is a woman-owned social enterprise that propels organizations, communities, and networks to the next level of impact through quality design and effective use of data. We
are reinventing impact management by providing strategic design and capacity building for data informed decision-making to organizations and networks that exist to drive change for our communities.
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