Carolina Center for Public Service.
Background
Carolina Center for Public Service seeks to establish a tool to track and disseminate community-engaged work across UNC, expanding upon UNC’s legacy view of "community engagement" from just research out to classroom, project, and partnership work. The tool is meant to leverage existing support of university data networks to expand access on work being done to all faculty, staff, students, and community partners. It is currently under development and should be released in the coming year.
In designing and developing the tool, CCPS sought to:
Identify and engage the critical audiences and contributors
Develop criteria by which CCPS priorities are determined
Prototype some initial strategies
Build a reasonable model for their final product
Approach
Collaborate with CCPS and leverage design thinking strategies into the development of CCPS’s upcoming collaborative database.
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Define your audience: Including Extremes and Mainstreams and Conversation Starters. Who do different stakeholder groups (state and local policymakers, campus administration, community members, campus faculty and staff etc.) define as end users? Who are they? Whose wants/needs are currently prioritized over others?
Interviews: Both individual and focus style groups. What do the different end user groups give and receive right now? What are their hopes and dreams for a new database platform? What are their greatest fears for the database platform?
Analogous experiences: Design team members will identify and experience related tools and resources. Who else (individuals or groups) have done something similar well or poorly? What were some of the challenges/barriers? What were the lessons learned?
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Finding themes: Including Top Five, creating Insight Statements, and Bundling ideas. Based on the activities in Phase 1, what are the takeaways and recommendations?
Co-creation sessions: With different members of the prioritized user groups, what might they create with the resources at hand?
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Rapid prototyping: What assumptions about the database can we test in bits and pieces with low-cost, quick-to-make prototypes?
Iterating: How do real users respond to the prototypes? How can we change and combine them to put together a more robust database?
Impact and Outcomes
The design team led a broad coalition across UNC to leverage existing support of UNC data networks to expand access to information on work being done to all faculty, staff, students, and community partners. Based on a series of low-fidelity initial prototypes and a series of strategic partnerships, an additional staff member was hired in the Center for Public Service to develop a database in SQL that connects to overarching university networks that track IRB approvals and Tenure and Promotion processes to reduce the need for redundancy in data entry and pull information from individual school and department silos into a central community repository.
