Participatory Community Calls
By: Gráinne Hamilton
Tags: Open Engagement, Improvement, Design, Community Calls, Community Engagement

Participatory Community Calls

Despite the benefits, working in the open can be daunting for teams and organisations. It requires the courage to share things that aren’t quite right yet, that are works in progress, rather than presenting a finished product. It requires developing an open mindset, one that tends towards sharing early and often and inviting contribution from others. It requires effective engagement with communities:

“Liaising with and assisting those communities is critical. And community calls are my favorite method for interacting with stakeholders both inside and outside a global network of organizations.” Laura Hilliger

As part of We Are Open’s work with the Planet 4 team at Greenpeace, we are helping them with open engagement.

Why is open engagement helpful? Because many perspectives will help you build a better and more resilient product. It will connect you to the kind of people you are trying to reach, and that community can raise and help you cater for eventualities a small project team might not think of alone.

“Open organizations (or networks of organizations such as Greenpeace) explicitly invite participation from external communities, because these networks know their products and programs are world class only if they include a variety of perspectives at all phases of development.” Laura Hilliger

We are working on strategies and processes to help the Planet 4 team engage with different types of community members in a structured way. We’ve worked together to define five “tracks” for open contribution at Greenpeace:

Stakeholders

Designers

Analysts

Developers

P4 general Community

What is a community call?

As our colleague Laura explains in 11 steps to running an online community meeting:

“A community call is a meeting, held online, that invites people to gather at a specific time each week or month. They’re recurring and open to anyone who wishes to join. A community call is a tool for solving problems, breaking out of individual silos, and finding points of connection between different initiatives or people. Most importantly, a great call serves as a launchpad for communities. Community calls bring people together from all over the world. They serve as a social and cultural touchstone. It’s all about connection.”

Community calls work best when they are welcoming and interactive. They need to provide safe spaces for contribution and provide the right tools to enable people to participate in ways in which they feel comfortable. A well paced agenda will help to build from introductions through to genuine collaboration, and with careful facilitation, rich and meaningful outputs will result.

The First co-Design Community Call

We were delighted that the Planet 4 team successfully ran their first, regular design community call recently.

“We’re learning from the Community calls that if you open the door and ask people, they will respond.” William Morris Julien, Design Lead at Planet 4

Facilitated by Magali Fatome, Senior UX Designer for Planet 4, and supported by her colleagues, the Planet 4, Co-design ofengagement features call included key features that will make a community call successful.

Check out the Co-design for engagement features deck.

It started with context and scene setting before moving on to interactive activities including ones the We Are Open team regularly use to empower collective ideation and decision making:

These activities led to highlighting concerns and helping to inspire a plan for next steps surrounding new engagement features in the product. From the buzz on the call, it was clear that everyone felt involved, motivated and valued. They felt connected to the process and invested in making it work.

Based on the feedback collected during the “pre-mortem” exercise, the Design team is eager to help participants solve some global issues we, as "Greenpeacers", identified. There were three major concerns that emerged:

1. Content is King

We can build snazzy features all day long, but if content creators at Greenpeace don’t design and build content specifically for those features, the product will not be used to the best of its ability. The issue was already identified years ago, while designing the MVP of the product. We haven’t completely solved it, and it’s time to address it again. Our biggest problem is that we tend to get siloed in our work. After seeing that this was the number one concern, we chatted with the design team to see if we might come up with a solution or just proposals to bat around with our colleagues:

Council of content

We need to ensure that it isn’t just the Planet 4 team talking about this issue, but rather content creators, communication specialists, storytellers, campaigners and program strategists. Content emerges across the board, so we need to be in lockstep with the rest of the organization. Perhaps we need to have a “Content Track” in addition to our other community tracks.

Content lake

Where does the global network of organizations create content? At the moment, teams create content in various team folders. Perhaps they post documents and send things via email. But when you have thousands of people, the information overload can make it difficult to sort through things. How might we coordinate stories better? How can we help facilitate the adaptation and reuse of content?

Open Communication

The Planet 4 team has worked hard to create a structure that allows for transparency. How can the team take what it knows about openness and apply it to communications? We’re going to start to find out!

2. Insights

The Planet 4 concept theorized that showing people how their individual impact contributed to global, collective action would be one way of showing how their involvement matters. Coming back to this idea, the second major concern the community identified was a concern around the benefits of participating in Greenpeace “challenges”. People wondered, “Why would anyone get involved?” and “What are the benefits of participation?”

To visualize impact, we need to have data. Luckily there is a team at Greenpeace International called “the Insights Team” and they are working to “aggregate and warehouse data from communications, engagement, campaign programs and fundraising and modernizing Greenpeace’s reporting, analysis and data science functions.”

So next steps? Work with folks from the Insight team to figure out what kinds of impact we can show, and help coordinate with program and campaign teams so that we are consistently collecting data that matters to our potential supporters.

3. The "Challenge" Feature itself

We still have a lot of comments and concerns about the challenge feature itself. The community wondered how we create meaningful challenges that make a difference. They are thinking about how Greenpeace National and Regional offices (NROs) can long-term engage users beyond a one-time action, or how the challenges fit into existing content types such as take action & campaign pages. We talked about what collective, social challenges might look like. Will people prefer to work together or as individuals? How can we tie together engagement asks in a way that inspires people to act?

Next steps

A second series of calls based on this feedback has just been wrapped up (see the video outcomes). We will continue to hone in on both the problems and possible solutions. First the team will present the outcomes and then,

“We asked questions, broke into small groups and brainstormed. So that everyone has the chance to express themselves.“ Magali Fatome

We’re enthused that the Planet 4 Design team has kicked off their community calls with truly participatory models. We Are Open knows that “perfection is the enemy of done”, and we’re eagerly supporting this team as they experience the messy awesome that comes with early engagement and collaboration inside of global communities.