Creating the capacity building game…

Open Development Camp Logo[Summary: crowdsourcing contributions to a workshop at Open Development Camp]

There is a lot of talk of ‘capacity building’ in the open data world. As the first phase of the ODDC project found, there are many gaps between the potential of open data and it’s realisation: and many of these gaps can be described as capacity gaps – whether on the side of data suppliers, or potential data users.

But how does sustainable capacity for working with open data develop? At the Open Development Camp in a few weeks time I’ll be facilitating a workshop to explore this question, and to support participants to share learning about how different capacity building approaches fit in different settings.

The basic idea is that we’ll use a simple ‘cards and scenarios’ game (modelled, as ever, on the Social Media Game), where we identify a set of scenarios with capacity building needs, and then work in teams to design responses, based on combining a selection of different approaches, each of which will be listed one of the game cards.

But, rather than just work from the cards, I’m hoping that for many of these approaches there will be ‘champions’ on hand, able to make the case for that particular approach, and to provide expert insights to the team. So:

  • (1) I’ve put together a list of 24+ different capacity building approaches I’ve seen in the open data world – but I need your help to fill in the details of their strengths, weaknesses and examples of them in action.
  • (2) I’m looking for ‘champions’ for these approaches, either who will be at the Open Development Camp, or who could prepare a short video input in advance to make the case for their preferred capacity building approach;

If you could help with either, get in touch, or dive in direct on this Google Doc.

If all goes well, I’ll prepare a toolkit after the Open Development Camp for anyone to run their own version of the Capacity Building Game.

The list so far

Click each one to jump direct to the draft document

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