August 16, 2019

More Good Tech for More Good

Some thoughts on Chris Thorpe's recent blog post for The Catalyst - Sector Tech: talent, tools, data and reuse. I've got massive respect for Chris' work and I'm looking forward to what The Catalyst get up to.

I think the focus on helping organisations to become more "of the web, not on the web" is great. Helping them understand how working in the open will let them share standards and software with each other will stretch all their budgets further, and build solidarity (at a time when it seems more adversarial because less funding means that if you win, I lose).

Working out how organisations can bring some level of digital in-house is also, I think, important. It's something I wrote about a while back.

There's a tendency at the moment for doing good through the medium of the digital agency. I can understand why: it lets you help a bigger range of other organisations (rather than picking one);it's what a lot of the people setting them up understand; and it's natural to want to work alongside a load of your technical peers rather than colleagues who don't fully appreciate the amazing work you're doing (I'm not really conveying what I mean by that - it's not that I think non-technical colleagues wouldn't be impressed or thankful for your work, but it doesn't validate what you're doing in the same way that the respect of your peers does).

There's definitely a place for agencies but I don't think they'll achieve the digital transformation that they're after, or that the client organisations need. Not compared with embedding bits of digital into the DNA of the organisation.

The Internet makes it easier for isolated digital people embedded in other orgs to be less isolated, but I don't think it's enough.

We should be encouraging organisations to support their digital staff by getting them to blog about their work, and present it at meetups and conferences.

Experimenting more with flexible working, and finding ways to share staff with similar organisations will also help, especially for smaller organisations which don't need a full time coder or UX designer.

Maybe we can encourage them to let staff work from co-working spaces like DoES Liverpool once-a-week or once-a-fortnight. That would give them a wider network of other digital folk to bounce ideas off and keep their digital skills fresh.

That sort of approach could also help when training people up. Maybe programmes like OH's Catalyst or university tech/digital courses could provide students to organisations to help them with digital, but also embed them part time in DoES Liverpool too to help with the how-tech-is-done-in-the-real-world experience. It would need more support than placements in tech firms, because you need more guidance in what's useful or good tech to adopt rather than just the new shiny when you start out, and non-tech firms won't be able to provide that in-house. Maybe that's a paid mentoring role for one of the freelancers in the co-working space?

And none of that has touched upon the opportunities to bring physical computing and digital fabrication into the equation. That's another huge opportunity, and something for me to think about more. I'd love it if part of MCQN's income came from building open-source connected devices to help charities and social enterprises.

Posted by Adrian at August 16, 2019 08:27 AM | TrackBack

This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.

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