Leeds City Lab Research Project (What could a city co-production lab be for Leeds?) WORKSHOP 3: WHAT IS YOUR EXPERIENCE OF CO-PRODUCTION BETWEEN HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE THIRD SECTOR IN LEEDS?
ACTIVITY 1: WORLD CAFE a) Activities: what kind of activities should the third sector and university partners undertake together? What works well and less well? •
Students as interns o
Festivals, event development
o
Placements
o
Masters students dissertations with third sector organisations
o
Evaluating studies ie saving £££ to NHS of supporting hospital learning
•
Longitudinal, long term thinking, vision for the future of the city
•
‘Space’ to have those ‘barmy’ conversations
•
Imaginative use of physical space for unis and third sector orgs o
•
•
Invite people in
Barriers to collaboration o
Building third sector/higher education ‘understanding of the offer’
o
Continuation/handover - students = short term links
Strategic level input ie.. o
Leeds ACTS informatics project ▪
o •
Use of third sector data and analysis > LIDA (Leeds Institute of Data Analytics) How to share and do so meaningfully
Statt/student exchange
Expertise exchange o
Community links
o
Student links
•
o
Statt links
o
Use LIDA as a model/space for systematic data analytics
o
Understanding the different ideas/offers in town > LIDA, ODI, Data Mill
Drivers > Health sector, urban planning
Difficult •
Data exchange – nervousness, people’s ability to use data, risk adverse, unclear about benefits
•
Difficult to tell between the benefits of what’s on offer in Leeds (see organisations below) and how to work with them
•
Having conversations with people who don’t agree with you, how do we engage with people who don’t believe in what we’re doing? ANTI CO-PRODUCTION. Capture disruptive feedback.
Exciting Opportunities •
People already working with Data in Leeds – potential for universities to work with Leeds Data Mill, ODI, LIDA, Third Sector Infomatics Project (TSIP) but need to be able to distinguish between benefits of each organisation
Surprising Space to be ‘barmy’, ‘longitudinal’, space beyond the everyday •
Both a physical and mental space
Research Fish (www.researchfish.com) •
Every investigator or researcher can publish any data set into public realm
•
Public can search for research data ( a lot of data is ‘invisible’)
b) Motives: what motivates you to want to work closely with others linking the third sector?
•
Source of innovation – fiscal = innovative ideas, ‘think differently of ideas’
•
‘Skill share’ – empowering, building community capacity
•
Co-operation rather than competition
•
Learning from each other
•
‘Voice’ – knowledge gets amplified
•
More collaboration happening
•
Access expertise
•
Access to resources
•
Uni – research impact with communities
•
‘Legitimacy’ grounded solving real world problems
•
Benefits to the city
•
Democratic
•
Breaking down the silos
•
Longer-term dividends
•
Need to put more value on long term approach
•
Need to articulate longer term vision better
•
‘Risk and vulnerability;
•
Breaking down of perceived boundaries
•
Cast your bread upon the waters
•
Agility – easier to respond, trust
Difficult: The ability to articulate the longer term vision Exciting: Breaking down silos and barriers, more collaboration happening, benefits go both way Surprising: Times have changed – revisit ideas, a while ago it was considered that third sector, universities and the Council working together was regarded as a non-starter, considered threatening, and now it’s considered as an opportunity
c) Impacts: what kinds of ideas and solutions can be generated when the third sector and university partners come together? Are these better than when we work alone? Ideas: •
Space for o
Barmy ideas
o
But OPEN to disruptive thinking/challenges
o
Combined with real world experience – each bring their own backgrounds
•
‘Not shut down’ / open to blue sky thinking but with real world applicability
•
Access to ideas ‘at the coalface’
Challenges:
•
Cultural Challenges creates opportunities
•
Challenging accepted ways of working – ‘always done it like that’ – don’t know what we don’t know
•
How to turn research into implementation/solution? (Research > impact) Are people asking the right questions?
•
Need for strategic and local partnerships
•
Risk if too instrumental/impact focused o
Monitoring impact – impact to uni ‘impact agenda’ (legitismisation, Q&A) etc
•
Need to not just focus on negatives – e.g. keep human aspects/values as well as look at deprivation indices
•
Challenge: Ideas into solutions
Opportunities: •
Access to technical expertise and real-world experience
Impact works for both (university and third sector) •
Two different cultures (but third sector is not a single entity)
•
Create challenges and scope for expansion
Broader horizons, but pulling down to where stuff happens Researchers open to change Difficult: Combining different ways of working and different languages/cultures Exciting Opportunities: Make impact meaningful – not just words! The word ‘impact’ gets overused? Risks becoming just a means to an end Surprising: Is there a risk of excessive reliance on data – don’t lose the human story in the process? Data vs knowledge based experience - over reliance on data can come at cost of not knowing what’s going on in people’s lives General discussion points: •
How do we collaborate with groups like LIDA? Different ways of talking about the world alongside data analysis
•
The Long Now - capturing the best of human knowledge and understanding, making data accessible to anyone and everyone, when we think about the kind of future we want to make for cities we need to involve as many people in these conversations as possible
•
What kind of city do we want to live in? One where we feel we have a voice and our children have a voice and it’s not a question of having the right experts in the right space who will tell us what to do.
•
We need a SPACE TO HAVE A VOICE, for articulation and a chance to feedback on what you’ve just done
•
Challenges of interpreting data - one set of data can be interpreted in two completely different ways
•
Keep revisiting questions, not assuming you’ve got the right answers the first time - data might mean something now, but something different in the future
ACTIVITY 2: REFLECTION ON HE/THIRD SECTOR CO-PRODUCTION ACTIVITY IN LEEDS AND PRIORITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT a) Where co-production activity happens Third sector/ business •
ACTS! Currently between those in the professional sector
•
Co-production between workers-service users – at points of service delivery
Higher education/Business •
Research collaborations
•
Where is the ‘UoL’ front door? – Parkinson Building floating above the city looks formidable
•
City office sustainability service
b) How we use different spaces in the city?
•
LBU – community
•
‘City chair’ > Park bench > conversations : talking about the future of the city
•
‘Supportive’ spaces
c) What we could do differently?
•
Filter
•
Involve third sector in city decision making as a matter of course
•
E.g. Leeds initiative – plan – think ‘third sector’ in design
•
How to engage/use SPACE WITHIN the university – LBU – UoL - Trinity
•
Invite people into uni spaces
•
Take a more ‘systems’ view of the city ie food
d) Constraints and Opportunities Constraints: •
No ‘city’ research programme
•
Connections of student ‘body’ to Leeds/from Leeds
•
The ‘UoL’ corporate view
•
Varied view/vision/valued visions
Opportunities: •
Developing research bids
•
Bid consortia
•
Involvement? > Design? > Co-production?
•
Citizen theme
•
Widening participation activity
Discussion Points around Leeds ACTS! •
Outcomes for WHO? – Takes a lot of TIME for connections to translate to effects on community
•
Community organisations aren’t involved as much as they can be at the moment o
They need to be involved by the Council as a matter of course so plans are more likely to be implemented?
•
Bids have short time window - bid consortia
•
The front door to the university, the permission to have community people populate the space and have them feel like they’re not ‘threatening’
•
Links to communities of Leeds - interesting provocation - used to be significant proportion of students at Leeds who used to be working class, local. Business school kids are now from other places - Europe and London.
•
‘City on the Hill’ – university appears unobtainable, Parkinson building visible from terraces of Harehills
•
Third Sector - grass roots organisations/community based/TS are different things but do not solely represent communities of Leeds. Rachel Loftus - working with BME communities. Not enough outreach to BME groups.
•
Communities of Leeds voice is missing and they cannot access - how to capture these voices in resilient way - Leeds ACTS! is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole piece
•
Reinvent the open and inclusive university in the full sense
•
Barmy idea - a chair in the city, a park bench, invite people to sit and have conversation, we need more than that even - benches that actively invite people from different backgrounds to talk about the future of the city, very informal spaces that people almost trip over to enable conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Leeds ACTS does not equal community of Leeds - third sector is very diverse entity/concept (perhaps more than anything else). Most people involved in Leeds ACTS! are from the faculty, some of the communities they work with are not as deprived as others. Leeds ACTS! doesn’t provide answer but it does provide a channel through its members to reach those communities but it’s an ongoing challenge.
•
Everyone's different roles are equally valid, situation where everybody has self interest but they need to be pulling in the right/same direction
•
Don’t want to talk about co-production and collaboration and working together - want to talk about making Leeds better
•
We are rich, powerful, we have tonnes of stuff, we are the most unconstrained humans on the planet e.g. Leeds university academic, there’s problems at the top but the top isn’t that bad, the centre can be moved, but we have the right to demand more
•
How city is managed is not necessarily how the city operates, university has a neutral perspective on that which allows you to target your efforts more effectively, e.g. food is a good example - food system in the city – it’s not the council’s responsibility but is one of the most important systems in the city understanding how that works, who benefits from it, who doesn’t. What can collaboration do to make that system more equitable, fair and sustainable? We still have this assumption we are all working for the common good, these spaces that we want to create - do we need agreed ground rules? Have assumption that everyone’s here for the right reasons and co-production could be done for entirely the wrong reasons.
•
ACTIVITY 3: WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS A ‘CITY LAB’ COULD TAKE TO HELP CULTIVATE CO-PRODUCTION BETWEEN HE AND THE LEEDS TS? •
We are thinking too small!
Think about funding sources •
Resolve Money issue – what model?
•
Other networks in Leeds – Tech Hub? Fab Lab type? LIDA?
•
Sponsorship
•
Crowd Source
•
Philanthropy
•
Alumni networks in the city/ Alumni campaign
•
Multi-sponsors – identify potential
•
Income generation model – Leeds enterprise centre? Bar? Cafe? Club?
•
Can’t be for free – TIME
‘Prototyping’ the city lab •
Chat benches
•
Pop-up/ temporary spaces – less structured vs formal? > focused ideas
•
What is a ‘prototype’ of a city lab?
•
Map potential spaces – Leeds Empties – Sue Ball’s work
•
Mobile bus that goes to the neighbourhoods – talk to bus company for donation
•
Talk to museum and library
•
Merrion centre/Ziff
•
Concrete projects: Media, Plan
•
Needs to be beyond pop-up?
Clarify who to engage with and how they can be involved •
Engage trade unions
•
Clarify 3rd sector and grassroots – are they involved?
•
Huge networking/community building push
•
Role of private sector in relation to city lab
•
[Enterprise – community – university) – extend links to all/other sectors
•
Council plan linked to HE-TS networks via Leadership, third sector, local
•
UoL Strategic Partners
•
H2020 – coproduction call 2016
Clarify identity of the ‘city lab’ (physical & urban) •
A PHYSICAL space(s) (with digital infrastructure) o
Real people
o
Digital divide
o
It’s what people want
•
Hub/spoke – City <> Campus <> Community spaces
•
Central co-ordination of a dispersed network
•
We need institutions to move operations space
Clarify identity/principles of the ‘city lab’ •
Clarify values and intent
•
City Lab as an umbrella network/overarching concept?
•
Capture disruptive ideas
•
Create higher education front door using what we have
•
How to learn from creative co-production?
•
‘Bottom up’ or ‘top down’ organisation?
How to engage people? •
•
Need to decide on relevant Themes to engage people on o
Health
o
Housing
o
Sustainability
Focus on urban issues/themes o
Urban = systems of provision (SoP) e.g. housing, transport, food, energy, etc
•
Coming to learn about the basic systems of life in Leeds and how to make them better – THEMES – food, transport, health, violence, housing, different ways people can plug in- making those things better, not about this thing co-production – it’s about CITIZENS CHANGING LEEDS
•
Teaching research service, advocacy
•
Open access ‘city lab tv’ – accessible from numerous venues and people’s homes
•
Cross organisation hot desking – interaction + cross pollination on a daily basis – existing spaces
•
Secondments
Discussion points around next steps for city lab Do we need Physical space(s) and the politics of WHERE if so •
a.) Finding space b.) Moving day to day operations there - we can work there during paid work hours
•
Walking between floors in the same building - community and different universities
•
Do you do your day job at ODI?
•
o
If you come up with a good idea often arising from at data dive etc they’re given a free desk space for 3 months
o
While they’re there, they might bump into other people – serendipity
o
Can you extrapolate that model? Ie have a network of spaces like that that anyone can drop in on? E.g. all the universities, so anyone who perhaps lives in Headingley but works at Leeds Uni can drop in at Beckett’s park – rather than commute - if you had a series of those across the city people might start to gravitate towards them
You can do things that replicate library spaces, because Liberty dock was a semi failure , there’s lots of students from the different universities living there,. If we invested in space that was just mostly students working. For instance the new library space at Leeds uni is very different to the old, it’s much more designed for group projects and for collaboration – you never know where the good ideas are going to come from. It’s got to be a space that is designed for people to work in – that’s why ODI
works because co working spaces work because it’s working, not co-llaborating – not volunteer free time stuff, it’s where you earn your bread and butter.
•
We discussed that it does strongly need a physical space but with digital connectivity. Digital might be seen as possibly sexier or more inclusive but actually it’s about the value of coming together as people.
•
Does it need to be NEW physical space? On secondments, A perfect example is Tom (Knowland) working on secondment to the university on shared objectives. If you’ve got a programme of activities you can work within each other’s organisations and just doing your day job sitting a new environment
•
I like the idea that the city lab could be lots of spaces –community centre, libraries, shopping centres, benches.
•
All three workshops are pointing towards an institutional re-engineering, in having a presence. We have a lack of foothold in the city, it feels like we should claim that back somehow, and the exciting thing is so many sectors are interested in it, in different constituent elements, it’s going to have to be quite a substantial thing.
•
I would argue that the single best place is the Merrion Centre (city house has some problems in that it doesn’t have particularly good access although it is good because it’s a regional hub on top of the train station). The Merrion centre is good because it actually has a lot of extra space and lot of public facing space so for community classes and services you can do it. Upstairs in the Merrion Centre is a cavernous nightclub and cinema (abandoned), it was one of the first shopping centres in the country
•
Interface - It’s so close to the students – John and I (RU) did some work on the future of the Merrion Centre for the manager there some years ago now. One of the points was that it could be much more linked in to what the students need and what they can offer.
•
If we’re going to move teaching to this space we’ve got recognise that students are going get all the teaching there and its got to be accessible. The Merrion centre has multiple symbolisms – one of the first shopping centres of its kind, it’s about re-using space which I think will be a key politic, and it’ll be partly about the future of the Council – it will be in the face of the Council.
•
One of the nice things to do as part of the action plan is to scope out these spaces? o
Are these potential spaces mapped?
o
Sue Ball understands how to tap into available sources of information – Leeds empties mapping in South Bank
o
Susan Coan –knows of empty spaces in university
o
Community Asset Transfer in Leeds – the council have lists of community buildings and the ODI are mapping smart assets in Leeds too (digital element
o
We could have section in final workshop where we ask people to bring concrete ideas to feed into this – the WHERE question?
Engaging Alumni and funding sources/making money •
Alumni Campaign – I met with the university’s alumni team whose role is to encourage philanthropy from the hundreds thousands of alumni – it tends to focus on a say a new library, or whatever it might be, sponsorship for scholarships. I have a sense that there’s something about a campaign that will appeal to the alumni around the city. o
Should it be more focussed? Should we look for alumni in companies who would have a direct interest in this kind of initiative?
•
Alumni of universities still living in Leeds – those would be the first port of call – one of main reasons students come to Leeds if they’re not local is for the CITY not just the university
•
We need to be really serious about this – asking people for money long term isn’t going work – the thing has to incorporate actual money making operations – employs a lot of students and where students and everybody will spend a lot of money – and that is some kind of bar/entertainment/music/cinema – there’s no reason why this lab can’t own something where the workforce is made up students, where part of their scholarship package is to go to comms that’s connected to widening participation, and actually use the nightclub.
•
There’s a reason there’s a cafe here (Shine) – this cannot be self funded
•
How do you talk to the forward thinking alumni, who might be turned off by the usual campaigns, but might be find it really interesting to do something new and different?
•
Income generating models – if we can drum up some capital spend for a space – enterprise education programme income, Beckett would be the same, where students are supported to think about their own business models and ideas, either within programme or a year in enterprise
•
City partners who are encouraging
•
Corporate sponsorship – Morrisons?
•
Keep ambition big but test it at a sustainable and viable level – prototype it so we don’t go for the big white elephant, big fanfare then it flops
•
Audacious out of the box project figuring how to make it work over time – how do we move forward to make it a success Anti-capitalist social centres set up around the UK in 2005 – all became self financing on back of Booths – all of it was paid by the bar! (What about dry bar? Problematic)
•
Distilling all of this into Signposts – where do we go next?
•
There is 2020 call for co-production (won’t be announced until next year)
CO-PRODUCTION SPATIAL/BEHAVIOURAL OBSERVATIONS •
Does keeping the door open in large open spaces help create right atmosphere during discussions? Can hear clatter outside, noise acts like a connecting blanket, covers over silent pauses which may feel unproductive
•
Banquetting arrangement still very friendly (as per Tetley workshop)
•
Could having a flip chart (a physical representation of what is being ‘produced’) give scale to conversations? i.e. contributors aware that they need to make a point that can be noted down clearly
•
People do ‘mini’ exchanges between conversations/tables (interstitial meetings)
•
Is co-production a very extroverted way of working? O People relax and talk about other things after the bell goes –very intense during discussions and requires extroverted behaviour O How can ‘city lab’ encourage both introverted and extroverted thinking? (socially and physically)? O Table hosts need ‘quiet’ time to make sense of all the findings so they could be consolidated and presented as findings to group i.e. moments of introversion/reflection
•
TIME – should co-production conversations be allowed to run their courses? Feels like you’re dragging people away from interesting conversations after 10 mins – conversations are just getting going – but short time frame encourages getting right in to the subject straight away O Should a city lab have FAST spaces (e.g. book for 10mins at a time) and SLOW spaces? O Should be complemented with ‘inbetween’ micro exchange spaces
•
Glimpses of houses outside – windows are too high (it is a school refurbished), feels cliff like and uninviting to hold micro exchanges against O Walls are not ‘craggy’ enough to encourage micro-interactions at edges (compared to Tetley city workshop which had perching/leaning height window sills overlooking the city)