Setting the baseline and understanding city needs
A second step is ensuring the network you’re building is a response to real needs. This means understanding the goals and ambitions of the cities involved, what their current levels of digital maturity are in both the local authority and related territory more broadly, and what the gaps or needs are which the network can support them with. Each city must identify a challenge to overcome, a problem to be solved which will define what activities the city does during their time as a member of the network.
Our approach and methods
- Drafting a baseline study:
- Scope: Define clear questions for the baseline study. What is the overview of the theme, what unites and distinguishes the cohort, and what are the things to measure progress against?
- Data collection: Use the answers to the application process and additional interviews with city representatives and other key stakeholders from each city to gather the information required to answer key questions. In the case of ASToN these were questions like: what is the digital maturity of the city authority (skills, purchasing power, culture of experimentation, ability to build / maintain technology) and what’s the digital maturity of the city (e.g number of startups, % mobile phone penetration, etc)
- Analysis and synthesis: Analyse the findings from the data collection and synthesise the needs of the cities in the network – ask, where do the cities have similar needs? Where do they differ?
- Identify a clear city challenge: Work with the cities to identify a clear challenge each is willing to work on for the duration of the programme.
Lessons learnt from ASToN (2019-2022):
• Focus on the people in the network, and the unique insights from each city.
• Agreeing on the baseline can be a lengthy process. Using URBACT as a reference, we initially set-up the baseline work and the Engagement phase to 6 months. We very quickly realised this was not enough for several reasons. The geo-graphical distances between cities meant we needed more time to undertake the city visits. Also, the process of drafting the baseline, agree¬ing on what the core values and principles of the network were within the team and also with the cities, required several exchanges and discussions.
• Visiting the cities is a valuable opportunity. Rather than see the visits to each city as purely a research moment, they were an opportunity for the ASToN team in each city to gel, for the local authority to gather existing and new stakeholders together, to hear from and align different voices around the challenge, and to do some key exercises that would set the team up for success like a pre-mortem.
