Community workshops and exercises

Over the course of the month, our team led 2-hour workshops across the 7 communities. Each workshop held a standard agenda and set exercises.

There were 4 key exercises in the community workshop sessions:

Exercise 1: Imagining success

Task: Each group to create a vision for the future through a front-page news article that captures how data contributed to success for your community.

Goal: To understand the vision for harnessing data to deliver collaborative impact.

Exercise 2: Questions in context

Task: Each group is assigned one theme (strategy-wide data, community-level data, intervention-specific data, family and child-specific data) and answers three questions.

What data is most important? What is the source of that data? What will this data be used for?

Goal: To understand what data stakeholders believe is important data, why it is important, and where it can be sourced.

Exercise 3: Brainstorming ideas

Task: Define 6 features that you consider to be the most important for a successful future data solution

Goal: To prioritise features stakeholders believe are required to make an online collaborative community (i.e. a community portal) a success

Exercise 4: Reflecting on obstacles and gaps

What obstacles do you see to deliver this project? Do you see any gaps in our consideration of this data and features?

Key findings and insights

From the seven sessions, and corresponding surveys we identified recurrent themes. Top-level examples are below.

Data sharing, agreements, and consent

Data sharing and a lack of visibility as to what data may be available to share between stakeholders. Stakeholders and organisations also require varying degrees of data compliance, security, and risk assurance when considering sharing of data between.

Making data more accessible

Although stakeholders understand the value of collating data from across their respective communities, many do not feel confident that they have the time and expertise to generate insights from this data.

Overlap of services in complex cases

One of the issues most acutely felt by stakeholders is that they only have partial information on complex cases; they know that children in their care are interacting with other services and feel hindered by not knowing where this overlap occurs and what the nature of those interactions are.

Tracking community performance

Stakeholders want to track the improvements generated through collaboration and the use of shared data infrastructure. This is in part to make it clear that continued commitment from their own teams will have an impact, and also to build a foundation of evidence for investment in the right services and interventions that the community can leverage to drive through efficient change and programs.