Yeah - this is part of the problem, we've fallen a bit in the gap between projects. We want to demonstrate the overall approach but currently only have evidence for PlaceCal really. And the data we want to process we were, well... going to do as part of the bid, and have Dancing Fox tell us some impact stories from it we could then use going forwards. But perhaps reasonably, they're saying, you're asking for a million quid - what do we get for it?
An example of the kind of thing we get stuck in is like with PlaceCal. So we work by digitally including every group in a neighbourhood - slow and paintstaking work. But then information is available. The impact assessors then ask though, whats the impact of that? Do more people go to the events on it? And its like, essentially what you are asking for is for us to have a level of surveillance on the neighbourhood that would be incredibly invasive and 100x the cost and scale of the project. We can't get people to accept that just having access to information is important, and that you can't go to things you don't know about. This is most bizzare in social prescribing contexts where they're asking us for information it would actually be illegal to give as it goes against patient condidentiality. I think all this is a symptom of how much big tech has rotted peoples brains tbqh but its obviously not something we can really argue with - they have the money.
Stefan and I are gonna meet next wed and put our heads together on this and see if we can fund a small impact study somehow using uni resources maybe. I think we might need to make more simply of who'se asking for the information and then showing that we give it them. So a GP saying we cant refer people to things without this info but we have provided it, for example. Just capturing all this retrospectively is going to be a pain. I think we prob need to do some kind of survey with trans dim users but again we go out of our way to not track them so unless people are going to click a survey we put on the website its a bit ??? for us.
Anyway - will get back to you all after we meet. I think the thing we really need to prove is that the community partnership approach to tech is the only thing that actually resolves community needs - the tools are part of it sure but to actually do a community thing you need to contextualise it and get support from your friends, network, etc. So yeah - thinking caps on.
Kim