I recently facilitated a day long meeting with a group of 7 different community media centers in California. Our objective was to develop grants and programs as a group to strengthen our individual community media centers and support the movement as a whole.

To modify the steps of the game to help tell the story, here’s how Ericha used the Community-Driven Social Impact game with her network of Community Media Center participants.

Who was the community that you were working with?

I am part of the Digital Arts Service Corps, which is an initiative of the Transmission Project that pairs tech-savvy AmeriCorps Vistas with organizations dedicated to supporting community media and technology. My project this year is to create a collaborative among seven different community media centers (CMCs) in the greater bay area. The purpose of the collaborative is to share best practices and resources to create greater sustainability and more impact within our individual organizations and the CMC movement as a whole.

The community I am working with is comprised of the seven CMCs in the collaborative: Community Media Access Partnership (based in Gilroy, CA), Davis Media Access (Davis, CA), Access Humboldt (Eureka, CA), Access Monterey Peninsula (Monterey, CA), Community Media Center of Marin (San Rafael, CA), SF Commons (San Francisco, CA), and Community Television of Santa Cruz County (Santa Cruz, CA).

What were your goals for engaging with them?

During our first meeting as a collaborative, we identified four priority areas to focus on throughout the year. They are: productions, youth media/education, fundraising, and technology. I design and facilitate a day long, in person meeting every other month dedicated to one of these topics. We had our fundraising meeting on March 25. The goal of the day was to develop a collaborative grant proposal for a project that would be pertinent and beneficial to each CMC. This was a challenging undertaking considering the diverse populations served by centers in the collaborative. I used the CDSI game to get everyone thinking about the communities they work with, hear about other communities, and generate ideas about how we could work together to meet their needs.

How did you modify the game to match your community and goals?

I allowed everyone two minutes to write down their responses, then about seven minutes to share with the rest of their group after each question. After the final question was discussed, I brought everyone back together and collected some of the program ideas each generated by each small group. This ended up being a great way to jump start the brainstorming process. Ultimately, we were able to concentrate the broader ideas into three focused projects and chose one we wanted to move forward with.

What did you learn and what would you do differently next time?

I really appreciated the structured and in depth discussion this activity created. One thing I would do differently next time have better examples of the types of responses I was looking for with the first two questions. While there is value in having such open ended questions, some people needed a little more clarification and guidance to get them started. Overall, The CDSI game was an effective utilization of time that yielded meaningful results.

Share your story!

Have you run the CDSI game in your organization or at a workshop? Share how it went! The Community-Driven Social Impact game, like all of the content and resources on this website, is licensed for reuse and sharing with Creative Commons so you can feel free to put it to use in your organization!

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Photo credit: Michael Wesolowski

1. Twitter fail. It has become a regular occurrence for our monthly #4change chats to find Twitter not even working. This has meant some chats haven’t happened, some have stopped early or operated on a very slow conversation, and others (like last month’s chat) have moved off twitter and onto another platform all together. What this says to me is that the chats aren’t successful because of Twitter, but because of the people engaged.

2. One time. The #4change chats are once a month events that have taken place over the last year.  Each month there’s a new topic. We’ve covered some really interesting areas and engaged with a diverse network. We also have a great core of participants that contribute to every chat (you know who you are, rockstars!). The problem for me is that I’m far more invested and interested in certain topics than others (naturally) and I don’t have an outlet to discuss regularly in the same way. In the last chat, there was a lot of mention and enthusiasm for a monthly chat specifically on community building. And I’m here to say I’ll make it happen – if you’re with me!

Launching Monthly Community Builder Chats

Next Steps:

I can’t do this without you So, I’d love to hear from you about how we can design this together to be most successful, and then we can get started!

Please take just a few minutes to share your responses to the questions below in the comments.

I’m asking that you use the comments (instead of a survey or something) because I want responses to be public (if you want a response to be private for any reason, you can always email me) and provide opportunity for discussion and response.

• Why do you want to participate in a chat about community building, community management, and community driven projects?
• What kind of chat is most valuable to you: presenter w/ q/a, moderated chat but no “presenter,” open conversation space?
• Is once a month good?
• Where should these conversations take place? (Twitter despite the fails? CoverItLive? Other platforms?)
• Anything else you want to add!

I’m really looking forward to your responses and hoping that we can launch the first monthly chat in August! Thanks for all your contributions and ideas in advance

Amplified Leicester is managed by the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in partnership with the DMU Centre for Social Action and Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The project is commissioned and supported by NESTA, an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking key connectors across the city’s disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project enabled by social media.

Project objectives:
• To develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city’s grassroots innovation capacity through connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• To provide practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

The group is in an interesting position, preparing to move from the incubated group that it has been thus far to a more open group meeting less often (moving from every other week to once a month) in collaboration with CreativeCoffee. They are also hoping to learn from and document their experiences to share as a model with the larger global community looking to do something similar. Be sure to watch their space for more!

Presentation

There were two key elements that emerged in group discussion that I think are really important to note: A community-driven approach relies on two assumptions.

• That you know your community. You can communicate with, build programs or content together, and operate in collaboration with a community that you don’t know. Who are they, what do they do, where do they do it, what do they like, what do they have in common with you, and what would they be interested in doing together?
• That you and your community trust each other.  Even if you know who your community is, chances are that you won’t get very far trying to work/build/collaborate together if the community doesn’t trust you. And (don’t forget this bit) if you don’t trust the community. This point underlies all of the best practices and organizational culture required for successful community-driven social impact work.

Workshop

I facilitated a modified version of the Social by Social game, created to focus on the 4 strategic points highlighted int he presentation: Who’s the community, where’s the sweet spot, what tools could help, which roles are needed.  Ideally, you’d run this workshop with your team, organization, community group, etc. But, in this case, as participants represented all different groups, I asked them to think about each question from their own perspective and then share with the table some of their ideas to spark conversation.

Get the game pieces here:

• Playing grid
• Technology cards
• Roles cards

You Examples

Are you working on a community-driven project or looking to start one? What questions do you have? What lessons can you share? Or, if you’re underway, tell us about your project!