Another workshop to report….this time I went as a representative of Greenhill Community Resource Centre. The title refers to the Standards drawn up by the Scottish Community Development Centre on behalf of Communities Scotland. It’s a set of ten “rules” for engaging with community members, and both sides of people (public bodies and community groups) are expected to adhere to these rules and understand the roles each play in the process. They include involving, supporting involvement, planning, working together, sharing information, improving, feeding back and monitoring and evaluating the engagement process.
I suppose the Standards are a set of groundrules, a common foundation for encouraging consistency of engagement; but you also need to recognise which Standards are relevant to your community activity and apply them in practice.
You can view the Standards (Feb 2006) by going to:
National Standards for Community Engagement
You can also view a consultation document (Dec. 2006) on how the Standards have been working in practice by clicking on:
Evaluation of the Effective Engagement of Communities in Regeneration
…..You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness
by Julian Germain. It’s a lovely photography book, a portrait of an elderly gentleman told through original photographs. It’s very emotional to read and captures his life in so many emotive visuals. For those of us with non-digital cameras and who still like to stick our photographs into those psychedelic cloth-bound books with the static clear covers on the photos, this book is very welcome!
The point of this post (incase it’s not clear!) is that we are so focused on technology that often printed representations of our lives are so much more precious, often have a bigger impact and can be instantly passed around to friends and relatives when you are together; quicker than a web page or photograph blog. OK so it’s easy to turn on your laptop and pass that around but you get my meaning……..
There is an increasing emphasis in policy on using technologies to create meaningful learning projects; we need to be careful that we don’t exclude. If we’re obsessed with inclusive and engaging learning experiences then we need to respect the limitations and boundaries of technologies when used in a community setting. My project aims to test to what extent technologies are chosen over traditional means in capturing Greenhill as a physical space in which people live and engage with each other.
