Institute of Policy Studies

Citizen Mapping of Social Needs and Community Assets

WHAT IS IT?

Understanding citizen needs is a critical step required for the effective planning of social services, the design of public policy and prioritisation of investment decisions. Even though there are specialist research centres or government agencies in charge of specific domain areas, it is challenging to have effective oversight of all information relevant to a social issue.

This project is motivated by the question: Can “crowdsourcing” or “open collaboration” improve the quality of information on social needs and community assets? Can a decentralised mode of information gathering and sense-making by the larger community be more effective than a centralised one? In other words, can the community come together to map out social needs, and if so, can they do a better job than specialised agencies?

An open collaboration system —in the form of a wiki platform—was developed to allow mass participation in the mapping of social needs. This platform allows users to insert and edit information about disadvantaged groups such as vulnerable elderly, people with disabilities, youth-at-risk etc. They can also provide information on community assets who can be part of the solution—community artists, youth workers or game designers willing to apply their skills to social good etc. Users can provide basic information on existing services, programmes and resources available, or venture to provide more evaluative assessments of service or policy gaps.

Given that open collaboration platforms can easily become obsolete due to the lack of an active community of users, we propose developing issue-based networks to help populate the pages and deliberate on issues. This will allow open collaboration using the wiki platform, but sometimes closed door deliberations amongst members on issues they wanted a safe space to talk about, balancing the conditions required for success.

WHY DO IT?

Social Significance

  • If successful, an open collaboration platform to understand social needs can be a powerful way of encouraging democratic participation and public deliberation of key social and public policy issues. Previously excluded, smaller ground-up initiatives and informal support groups can begin to exchange views with voluntary organisations, professionals and experts. The result of such deliberations can then inform policymakers who may not be able to comprehensively and meaningfully engage all parties interested in a social issue.
  • If this project achieves its objectives, it does one better than merely contribute a once-off research on specific social issues or public policy concerns—it would have set up a platform that allows continuous contributions by diverse participants on a range of social issues. Instead of a snapshot of social needs, it would have created a dynamic knowledge base that is constantly updated.
  • The project will also contribute insights on: 1) the potential of mobilising mass participation in needs assessment; 2) how to create a coherently accumulative knowledge base useful for information systems and knowledge management practitioners; and 3) how to design public deliberations that are inclusive, engage minority voices yet produce quality and legitimate outcomes.

Academic Contributions

  • This project will contribute findings at the frontiers of the needs assessment literature. Current proponents have advocated more participatory approaches to needs assessments (where selected stakeholders are involved), and this study pushes it to the next level by asking the question: What if needs assessments can be done through mass participation of the voluntary sector, community groups and the public at large? 
  • It will also provide a useful contribution to the knowledge management literature that has focused on the role of web 2.0 technologies where user-generated content is a key feature. This project will help to understand how to structure and manage a knowledge base in terms of an analytic framework or knowledge architecture for Social Collab SG, so that mass contributions from diverse parties can be coherently accumulative despite the process being decentralised. Associated with this is an understanding of what features and affordances of the technology can better contribute to its success.
  • Importantly, it will also contribute useful insights to the literature on collaborative governance and public deliberation. Crowdsourcing initiatives tend to be hosted by a firm or government agency, so this will be a useful comparison on how a ground-up, members defined agenda is different from the more top-down agenda of hosting organisations. The community networks we intend to create will contribute to a better understanding of what factors influence the quality of information, the nature of deliberation, and its outcomes.

POSSIBLE APPROACH

We will hire and train 2 Research Managers (RMs) to engage different sectors of interest. They will demonstrate how to use the socialcollab.sg wiki platform and invite voluntary organisations, social enterprises and community groups from these sectors to use it. If a group is interested, they will be given user ids so that the system can track who has contributed what information. 

RMs will use a standardised approach towards engaging the community and need not “hard sell” the platform. They will engage with 6 sectors each but must choose two to create a community network for. See table below for an example: The RMs will engage all of the following 12 sectors, and can choose to set up networks for one from each category. For example, they might set up networks for those that are underlined below: youth at risk, migrant workers, advocacy organisations and youth workers. This is to ensure there is one community network that is created for each of these categories: a mainstream social issue, a peripheral social issue, a mainstream asset class and a peripheral asset class. The purpose is to allow comparisons so that we can determine if peripheral issues or asset classes are more likely to adopt open collaboration because they receive less attention or have no strong platforms of their own.

Mainstream social issues
1 - Elderly
2 - Mental Health
3 - Youth at risk		Peripheral social issues
4 - LGBT
5 - Migrant Workers
6 - Animal Welfare
Mainstream asset classes
7 - Social workers
8 - Social enterprises
9 - Advocacy organisations		Peripheral asset classes
10 - Youth workers
11 - Community artists
12 - Service learning offices of schools


Each RM will then support his/her assigned sector by helping to convene four Roundtables per year, so that the participants benefit from a facilitator and have a space for deliberation. RMs will play two key roles here. First, as contributing editors, they will contribute content and facilitate others to do so. The content they provide will be through what they can find online and in the news media only, and not require any primary research. This is because it is much easier for others to contribute to an already populated page rather than start from scratch. Second, they act as quality assurance agents to enhance the information quality of the content by communicating information quality norms and criteria. They will also provide support through templates or style guides.

Research Assistants (RA) will tag along with each RM to observe and document the responses of these various sectors to the platform. This will help to determine if less mainstream partners are more likely to use the platform given that they do not have strong networks of their own. RAs will also conduct interviews with key respondents, do focus group discussions and engage in participant observation to unearth the rationale and considerations that potential users have.

In summary, we would form 4 community networks each led by a RM and an RA will tag along to study the process and outcomes. Each community network would constitute a case study.