Author: b7061875

4) Cycle stakeholder forum

After the first meeting with Rob Snowball, we established some specific goals that we reached after interviewing our stakeholders, Rob Snowball, Heather Evans, Rorie Parsons and Mark Nelson. Regarding or long term goals, they haven’t really changed, they are just more precise. We still want to get more involved in the forum, a feeling shared by most of the people we met but our main goal will be to focus on how to make this forum progress.

This idea is divided in two points :

  • First, we need to improve the visibility of the forum, especially on the website which is not very visible. But also help cycling to get a better recognition in the city.
  • Secondly,  to make access to the feedback easier for all the people who attend the forum and also easier to publish it, after Heather has taken the minutes.

Furthermore, we find it useful to improve interactions between the council and the forum.

 

Products/services/devices that serve as inspiration for our project

 

Mobile Phone: We chose this piece of technology as it can be accessed by a wide range of individuals due to the popularity of smartphones and the fact that individuals can access information anywhere anytime. In our project it is important that we have a system that can communicate information clearly and can be accessed by a wide demographic of individuals in the forum, we think a mobile phone could meet this criteria.

Computer: We chose this device as it is one of the most effective ways of communicating information between individuals however this device is more accessible by the older generation. This is important as a large portion of the cycle stakeholder forum are of the older generation that might have more access to computers than mobile phones.

Email: Email was recommended to us as a good transfer and display of information by Mark Nelson as a way to communicate the time of meetings and also to supply the meeting notes to a group of individuals. Email newsletters are also simple to setup and use.

Website: A website is an accessible way to present and relay information. They can also be interactive which is important for the cycle stakeholder forum as we need a system in which people can communicate their opinions on different cycle routes around Newcastle.

2) CSF – Week 2

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.

1) Cycle stakeholders forum

Our team consists of 4 members : Aymeric, Ellen, Isaac and Jordy. We are from different countries and have therefore different planning backgrounds which we think could be an advantage for us in this project since we can benefit from our differences and come up with a good solution to the project.

Digital civics is a way of coming up with a solution to a specific issue through understanding the needs and requirements of a set of users through working with them. Nowadays, people use technology in their everyday life and is the most common way to receive and distribute new information in an interactive way. This is also why digital civics has become so important over the last years and is an helpful tool to get people more engaged and more involved in important questions that involves them and the area they are living in. By talking to different stakeholders and other people through a contextual enquiry in the concerned area we would get a wider perspective on the issue which would probably make us come up with a better solution to the issue.

This project includes working with Newcastle cycling stakeholder forum in order to come up with some sort of solution of how to display and allow discussions of the ideas and the issues of the forum meetings. Our goals for the meeting with our client are to understand the functioning of the forum and gather a greater understanding of its members and their experience of cycling in the city, how it could be improved and the issues they face. During this client meeting, it is also important to comprehend our client’s favourable method of displaying the information. We also need to identify the users who are going to be involved in our project as we need to cater to their individual needs. For example some individuals may not have access or be familiar with new technologies.

A issue we could face while talking to the client is that we will only receive one person’s   perspective on the issues raised. If we were able to get the chance to talk to different people from different groups of the forum and various areas around the city we would get a wider perspective of the actual issue which would give us a better chance to come up with the best solution for every part of the project, therefore resulting in a greater overall uptake in the numbers of our selected civic grouping using our project.