Making sense together

Overview

Every figure a public service leader sees was collected by someone, about someone, to answer someone's question. This module looks at power, voice and fairness in data, using five questions about power, the seven principles of Data Feminism from Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, and the FAIR and CARE principles. It closes with how lived experience and participatory practice, including Camden Council's resident Data Charter, change what data means. The same data is read differently by different people, and the meaning a group settles on depends on how it reads the data together. This module sets out practical methods for collective sensemaking: the Urban Institute's data walk, SenseMaker from Dave Snowden, the Delphi method, data parties and Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology, with a six-step cycle for designing a session and a guide to choosing between methods.

What you'll develop

In this Bitesize, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Use five questions about power, and the seven principles of Data Feminism, to examine who collects, who is counted and who decides what data means.
2. 2Identify common gaps in public service data, from digital exclusion to the Welsh language, and the questions that bring each gap into the open.
3. 3Compare extractive and participatory data practice, drawing on lived experience, the FAIR and CARE principles and Camden Council's Data Charter.
4. 4Explain why meaning is made in the room, and how the design of a meeting shapes the reading of data a group settles on.
5. 5Compare the data walk, SenseMaker, the Delphi method, data parties and rich pictures, and choose between them by question, scale, time and budget.
6. 6Plan a sensemaking session using the six-step cycle, from preparing the data and reading independently to surfacing differences and deciding the next probe.