Reflecting on seven months of Civic Making
This year, we launched a new program — Civic Makers — which is a space that enables people to come together and collaboratively make things with a positive impact on society. Here’s how it has evolved over the year and where it’s heading in 2020.
If you’re curious about what happens at Civic Makers, this probably isn’t the blog for you. Instead check out our summary articles from previous sessions here.
Instead, we’re going to be deep diving on the feedback we’ve gathered over the past year of running Civic Makers, feedback from our end-of-year survey, and thoughts for new formats that we workshopped collectively in our last session.
I’ll also be highlighting some of our biggest pain points that myself and my fellow organisers (Sean, Steven and Ruby) have been puzzling through this year.
If you’re thinking about launching a community event or something like Civic Makers soon, you’re going to want to read this.
Let’s go!
A quick note — for transparency, most of the photos and feedback we reference below is perusable in our public folder here. We also have the results of our end of year survey here.
Early Feedback
From our very first gathering back in May, we’ve made retrospectives a part of how we wrap up each night. We keep them simple, asking two questions and inviting people to leave their thoughts on a whiteboard or on sticky notes:
- What was good about tonight?
- What would you tweak next time?
Consistently, we’ve been amazed by the generosity of feedback and the constructive thoughts shared.
Early patterns that emerged around the things people enjoyed were: ice breaker activities, facilitated and well-timed activities (many of which we drew upon from here), the chance to learn from others, and of course, the food.
Early patterns that emerged around things to improve were: making more time for individual connections and getting to know each other, and more direction overall to lead teams and the collective towards our goals.
Recurring Puzzles
And this goals thing was a little contentious, because Civic Makers does have loose goals, which were co-created during one of our first sessions. They were to be a place where people can:
- Make a difference
- Work together
- Learn new things
- Contribute to social good
- And create tangible outcomes
You’ll note that none of these goals are particularly prescriptive or detailed — and that was by design. We wanted to create a space where people were empowered to define a successful thing for themselves, rather than the organisers saying “we’re building this thing, in this way and that’s going to be great”.
What we realised though, was that asking people to step into that level of uncertainty and self-determination can be daunting. It’s not a place everyone is comfortable in and probably something I take for granted — particularly after working in an organisation like Code for Australia where I’m constantly figuring things out in the moment and sprinting with ideas.
So we wondered, how can we nurture people through the uncertainty of newness and total freedom to create, while also support people who are already comfortable there and ready to make things. It was a balancing act of facilitated activities and free time, holding hands and letting people roam free. We haven’t quite got it figured out, but we’re getting there.
Another puzzle intrinsically tied to this was the fact that we had a small number of people returning regularly, and a large group of new faces at every session. This posed a few challenges:
- It made getting people up to speed difficult
- Explaining the fact we were still in the early stages, where nothing had yet been made, made it difficult for people to conceptualise what we were about and how they could be a part of it
- Time spent on-boarding new people sometimes diverted attention and time away from progressing ideas
Again, we haven’t quite figured out the secret sauce for this yet, but we’ve got a few ideas to try (more on that later).
Celebrating What We’ve Achieved
Civic Makers is still incredibly young and yet we’ve managed to achieve a lot this year.
Our goal was to bring a diverse group of people together, with a range of skills who were unified by a desire to make our city better — and we did just that.
Throughout the year, we’ve built a community of over 220 people where students, lecturers, government people, startup people, sales people, engineers, developers, designers, not-for-profit people… so many people from different backgrounds came together. And it’s been beautiful to see.
It’s also been appreciated by participants:
What did you enjoy most about attending Civic Makers?
“Meeting people from all backgrounds, coming together to work for a good social cause”
“Collaboration better people with very different skills and backgrounds”
“Mixing with others who cared about the same things as me”
“Meeting new people who wanted to do good”
“Discussion, different ideas and perspectives, a caring community, a place to be heard and make a difference, cool ideas”
And while we did experience some challenges moving into the making phase this year, with instead a focus on discovery and ideation, people also felt like the values and goals we defined at the beginning held true throughout.
We’re proud that we succeeded in creating a space that was welcoming, inclusive, and conducive to learning and working with new people from diverse backgrounds.
We’re also pleased that this was reflected in the feedback of why people weren’t able to come to sessions, which represented logistical rather than cultural barriers to participation.
Finally, similar to our other programs at Code for Australia, we’ve begin to ask the age old question of “how likely are you to recommend Civic Makers to someone” as a simple metric of success (marketers will recognise this as NPS).
Results for this are usually calculated on a scale of -100 to 100 and we’re incredibly proud of the fact that in one year, our score is currently at 70.
Where To Next
Of course, we also gathered so much insightful and constructive feedback through the end of year survey too.
What do you think we could improve for next year?
“I’m more interested in the building phases of projects, rather than planning and design.”
“Some ideas to try out: — have Subject Matter Experts come with their problems/ideas that they’d like to explore — have more ppl that could help us break down a big issue, and hone in on a problem to focus on — introduce more ‘asynchronous’ ways of working on a problem outside of meetups?”
“Opportunities to contribute between sessions — hard to tell where input is likely to be productive”
“Aggressively timebox “problem discovery” to ensure Civic Makers transitions into the “Making” space sooner”
“Have a bit more focus on the objectives for each session and a clear group leader to steer conversations / ideas in to actionable outcomes”
“We need to look at how we can deliver... I think a tangible project would keep people coming back and grow the movement.”
“Think of tools that will keep people motivated and interested in the project/s they are in even if they cant attend. Perhaps try “boundary-less” projects where we break things into tasks and ask all across different groups to grab a task that motivates them (but have some time boxing so they do it!)”
“To open up Actions in a Github repo, or a Notion or Trello board, like an Open Source Project, ie, “Good First Issue”, “Help wanted””
We also explored many of these issues and ideas in our final session together.
There are so many things to try, and most of it seems to be circling around three key challenges:
- How do we get new people on-boarded quickly and contributing in a way that’s meaningful and flexible?
- How do we create continuity and progress between meetups?
- How do we support people to move into making?
While we’ll be doing some deeper planning and sense-making of all of these suggestions in the New Year, some ideas to test seem to be:
- Creating more structure around on-boarding
- Creating and maintaining rituals around sharing what happens in person in an online format that’s visible for others to contribute to (whether that’s through Trello or something else)
- Allowing those who are ready with an idea to run with it — whether that’s a problem owner from government, from a not-for-profit, or just an individual
- Creating a repeatable format for running the sessions that is supportive of these pioneers and new folks, where the emphasis is more on connecting people who have identified a problem (and maybe a solution) to those with skills to fix it — rather than starting something entirely from scratch
- Experimenting with more time together — whether that’s a weekend session or a longer nightly session — to build momentum
- Experimenting with more structure and goal setting on a monthly level. For example, getting team leaders to create monthly plans or goals which specifically highlight skills they’ll need. Creating a commitment structure where people can join a project for a month-long sprint, and then choose to continue or not — hopefully avoiding awkward fizzle outs and feelings of burn out amongst participants.
We’re incredibly excited to give all of this a go, and look forward to continuing to collaboratively build this forum together with our Civic Makers.
For now though, we’re excited for a much needed break to relax and recharge! See you in the New Year — stay tuned for our first session here or on the Code for Australia Slack (#civic-makers channel).
Curious about something in our work we haven’t mentioned here? Leave us a comment or question in the comments or via Typeform, or reach out to us here, and we’ll be happy to answer all your burning questions!
