Menu: Start, About us, Services, Methods, Themes, People, Projects, Impact Strategy, Blog
Workshops
A package of two 1 day workshops to reimagine citizen engagement as experimentation (action) to regenerate local economies, rather than consultation. Each workshop fits up to 100 participants.
Workshop 1: Discovering alternative paths to resilient local economies for post-covid19 recovery
Goal. Done right, sustained engagement of citizens has far-reaching (and not always obvious) consequences on internal processes, power dynamics, management of the funding cycle and other deep features of the institutional landscape. However “done right” entails awareness of how valuable the collective intelligence of citizens is, and the will to engage with them in substantial, not just formal ways. We aim to reach a shared understanding of the mix of technology, methodology, institutions and ethics underpinning successful efforts to engage citizens in economic resilience. Output: a collaborative writeup of the theme at hand as understood by the group. Outcome: participants converge on the vision of the problem, priorities and key challenges.
Activities:
- Part 1: Setting up. Listening sessions and deep Q&A about 3 cases of unconventional paths to economic resilience and regeneration in response to crises.
- Part 2: interactive session. Participants will use a simple web application to interrogate an ethnographic dataset on community responses to care needs. These responses, largely bottom-up, can be read as a particularly active form of citizen engagement. The data reveal the deep motivations and narrative behind the citizens’ decision to engage with public issues. Requires laptops. Output: a map of the determinants of participation based on the dataset. Outcome: sophisticated understanding of novel paths to building resilient local economies in response to Covid19, and ahead of future crises (e.g due to climate change).
Workshop 2: Citizen engagement readiness for post Covid19 economic recovery
Goal. Policy Interventions to revitalise local economies do not exist in a vacuum, nor are they drawn on a blank slate. They are small piece of a large ecosystem with the institutional actors at its centre. The cultural differences between the culture of any large organization and the protagonists of novel paths to economic regeneration on the ground makes it inevitable to navigate tradeoffs, reach compromises, and incorporate constraints. We aim to reach a shared understanding of these in the case at hand, so that the new initiatives to rebuild regional economies can be radical and innovative, while not clashing with its parent organizations.
Activities:
Part 1: Setting up processes and design principles. Output: a collaborative writeup of the theme at hand as understood by the group. Outcome: participants converge on the vision of the problem, priorities and key challenges.
Part 2: Building the specifications for successful engagement of citizens in efforts to build regional conditions for resilient livelihoods in the aftermath of Covid19. This is a whiteboard-and-post-its session intended to map the main points of attention and propose solutions. Its output is a specification document for the team in charge of programs’ rollout (for example a prototype flow chart of the process to engage in co-design of the programs). Outcome: awareness of the points of failure of building momentum amongst the citizenry to birth new paths to resilient livelihoods.
Examples of outputs from previous, comparable workshop we held at the World Bank
Edgeryders Workshop Follow Up report_ Text based.pdf (1.1 MB) Edgeryders Workshop Report_ Findings, Insights, Discussions.pdf (6.6 MB)
Enquiries: company@edgeryders.eu