Community Technology Partnerships

Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs) are a concept we’ve been developing since 2016—a methodology for creating tools that work, with the communities they’re for. It means understanding and documenting the barriers facing the groups we work with, and using those barriers to determine the direction for any tools or processes we develop. We wrote more about it in our Year 1 Report following receiving funding from the National Lottery Community Fund.

CTPs inform our approach to PlaceCal, rooted in the role of the PlaceCal Organiser. Organisers are key to making PlaceCal work—a point of contact, embedded in the community, building real relationships with Partners and helping to develop their tools and processes in order to get the most out of PlaceCal (and the other tools they're already using).

The CTP methodology emerged from Asset-Based Community Development, pioneered by C2 (Connecting Communities). It works with the assets which are already in place in a community—the resources, skills and experience a community already has—and works with the community to better connect and use these assets.

In context

Applying Community Technology Partnerships to PlaceCal means that we aim to work with what people are already using and link that to PlaceCal. This is why PlaceCal works with a large range of calendar sources and widely-supported standards—so there's the best chance possible that Partners who want their information on PlaceCal won't need to change much, if anything, about how they're currently working.

PlaceCal Organisers work directly with Partners to train Partner admins to use PlaceCal, and advise on how Partners can use the skills and tools they already have in-house to generate event information in a format PlaceCal can read. They also serve as the bridge between the PlaceCal team and the communities on the ground PlaceCal is operating in. If you're interested in becoming a PlaceCal Organiser get in touch with the PlaceCal team!

Digital skills and obstacles to using PlaceCal

Community Technology Partnerships also mean listening to the needs of the community as they present them. We found that digital skills confidence is a huge issue in many communities, so part of the work of implementing PlaceCal (for Organisers) is to help people in your community to build their digital skills. This might be something as simple as showing them how to use Google Forms and Google Calendar to keep track of their events, if they don’t have anything in place already they feel comfortable using.

Many groups, especially grassroots and DIY organisations, are working with fuzzy and indistinct systems for managing events internally, which doesn’t create a single point of truth—something that's just as frustrating for the people working on a project as it is difficult to import into PlaceCal. By working with a group to develop a system which works with PlaceCal, Organisers will also be addressing a social and organisational issue for that group, and making it easier for them to deliver their work on the ground.

If a group an Organiser is working with has a particularly hard time getting into PlaceCal—we want to know about it! We ask Organisers to keep a list of the barriers and obstacles faced by the partners they work with so we can feed this in to our ongoing research, informing the trajectory of PlaceCal’s development.

We go into more detail about how to support Partners in the New Organiser Onboarding training we offer to all PlaceCal Organisers. If you're interested in undertaking this training please get in touch with the PlaceCal team.