What’s the point of working in the open?
9 September 2019
The MBL team are trying to follow CAST’s Digital Design Principles. One of them is ‘be open’. Below we share a bit more about our thinking on how we work in the open.
Principal: Involvement and Decision-making (maternity leave)
Charlotte helps charities and funders evaluate, improve and communicate their impact.
The CAST’s Digital Design Principles explain being ‘open’ as:
Being open makes things better. If you are developing a digital service, being open has two benefits: it helps avoid duplication, and it enables everyone to improve by not repeating mistakes. By sharing your learnings and, if appropriate, your code, others can build on your work.
You should also listen and contribute when others are being open and building on their work. Whether that’s learning about a particular model of intervention, or looking to reuse technology rather than building from scratch.
Being open isn’t just about supporting collaboration. It’s also about supporting transparency in our sector. It means we can hold ourselves to account through open scrutiny of our decision and approaches, and ultimately improve our collective practice and impact.
What are we doing to work in the open?
We started NPC Labs to do just that. Through it we want to share our learning, so others can build on it and learn from our mistakes. It’s also about being transparent, so others can feedback on our work, and improve it.
But being open is also about listening.
We are keen to hear from you – what are you working on? what have you learnt? what do you think of our work?
