During seminar two we got to meet Rob Snowball from the City Council who informed us about their work with the Cycle Stakeholder Forum. The forum’s role is to bring the people interested in cycling together to exchange information and ideas on how to improve the current cycling conditions in Newcastle. At the moment the forum’s demographic consists mostly of the same people who’s been in the forum from the beginning; people who already cycle and they are mostly elderly people or women and men in their 50’s and older. There’s a lack of younger people in the forum which he’s hoping we could find a solution for; how can we get younger people and students involved in the forum?
It became clear that the main point of our project with the Cycle Stakeholder Forum is to find a solution on how to get more people involved in the subject. Right now are the city council only using their current email list of 200 people to get the discussed information about the forum out which means that the rest of the city’s people won’t get the information and therefore they probably don’t know about the forum’s existence and that they have a chance to get their voice heard about this subject.
During the discussion with Rob some questions about how the city council actually work with reaching out to different groups in the community came up and it became clear that they aren’t really working on doing that at this point at all which is questionable since it’s also clear that it’s the variety of community groups they want to reach out to. So one big question is how to get the council to go from “wishes” to actually take action in this subject.
Together with Rob we came up with some project goals; both short term and long term. The short term goals are to talk to more stakeholders so we’ll get a wider perspective on what they’re expecting from the project. The stakeholders we’ll talk to are currently in the forum with different roles; Heather who takes notes and minutes, Mark and Andrew who work in different communities in the city with for example questions about disability and also Rorie who’s working at Newcastle University and has been involved in the forum as well. We want to hear what they think could be improved, maybe they have their own solutions or ideas on the problems which could help us with our final result.
The long term goal is to find a solution to the problem which basically means to get more people involved in the forum and also inform the community about the benefits from cycling.
Hello team, your post has specific strengths. These strength particularly relate to a strong start to your stakeholder map and process analysis as evidenced in the discussion. There is also a good indication of a key question… how to get more (younger) people involved in the cycle stakeholder forum? It is interesting that you pointed to a disconnect from what is wanted and what might be done in terms of publicity around the cycle stakeholder form. This may be for practical / resource limitations. Perhaps continue explore this theme and try to see what might be done to support more outreach and what other concerns there might be in doing so.
I note that there is a lot of talk about how to get more people involved; however I would also challenge you and explore, how issues that were raised by anybody at the forum could be transparently communicated, and followed-through. Perhaps this could be linked to the concern for more publicity. In this, perhaps consider information needs for different audiences, and what collaborative opportunities you might enable through a creative / digital proposition. I also challenge you to continue to unpack user needs with the help of our process and stakeholder mapping — keep refining those illustrations, perhaps digitally, and build up a strong case for three to five key user requirements that will become the basis for your creative / digital design.
Good work. Onwards.