Three Things Thursday is an opportunity for feedback innovators to describe three specific rules, suggestions, or best practices from their own feedback work. By sharing these ideas and practices with the greater feedback community, we are building a blog series of examples from the community of feedback being the feasible thing to do. Would you like to share your advice for building and sustaining feedback loops? Drop Roderick a note at [email protected]
At LIFT a nonprofit supporting low income families across the US, we recently released a report describing our experience collecting member feedback. Listening Better outlines LIFT’s top ten lessons for designing and implementing a feedback survey targeting the people you serve through your work.
Many of us have already given up on our New Year’s’ Resolutions and we are only two weeks into 2017. If fewer than 10% us are likely to succeed in meeting our individual New Year’s resolution goals, how many of us are likely to succeed in our public sector transformation initiatives, like affordability, open governance, and homelessness?
As the year runs down we’re in a reflective mood at Feedback Labs. It’s been a year of exciting growth for us: our team doubled in size, with Meg and Megan joining Sarah and Dennis. Our network grew too: this year we reached over 200 organizations through LabStorms, Summits, and initiatives like the Practical Adaptation Network.
I recently published the latest paper in AGI’s Art of Delivery series. That paper, Shoulder to Shoulder, outlines how external actors, particularly international partners, can work effectively with developing country governments to help them deliver services while building government capability.
Last month, more than 140 feedback enthusiasts gathered in Washington DC at the second annual Feedback Summit – Feedback Summit 2016: From Talk to Action. This year’s conversations centered on concrete, practical steps towards closing feedback loops in our work.
At the Feedback Summit 2016: From Talk to Action, we convened 80 different organizations that spanned from domestic service-providers and governments, to international aid agencies and practitioners, to US and UK funding organizations. The two days were filled with conversation around how to make the closing of feedback loops a feasible practice.
A lot had changed since my last support visit to _Utarpradesh– the project team had now fully embraced the feedback mechanism. They were thriving: listening and being responsive to community questions, suggestions and concerns. A stark contrast to my first visit, where I’d left feeling in a spin, overwhelmed by the diversionary tactics that thwarted my scheduled plans to help the team set up a feedback system.
When people ask about the vision of Insights.US – I can hardly describe it in one sentence. I could start with a sentence like: Inclusive decision making is about integrating stakeholder knowledge into the decision making of an organization. People get this – but the vision is deeper.
Lack of civic engagement is a source of fragility and the potential demise of any democracy. Many governments and organizations have tried to solve this problem by pumping more information and more data at citizens in the name of transparency and engagement. What the government expects in return is feedback and engagement from citizens. But what if that doesn’t work?
The potential for new technologies to bolster feedback loops is game-changing. Over the past two decades, a growing body of research suggests links between ICTs and economic growth, social development, and higher levels of democratic participation.