Coproduction lessons

I can't define coproduction. But I think I can spot it. And I think Barod and I have learned a few lessons about 'doing coproduction':

• you can't coproduce unless you can communicate freely
• you can't coproduce unless your shared vision is stronger than your desire for the familiar and personal comfort zone
• you can spot coproduction because anyone in the group can initiate anything (budget decisions, ideas, strategies, projects, parameters for working together, who should be involved), and everyone knows what the budget is
• coproduction isn't the only way to work together. Consultation and representation on boards are still important and valid.  What's vital is that we don't label something as 'coproduction' just because it sounds good or involves some form of working together.

Do those tests work for you when you reflect on your own experiences of coproduction? What would you add? What would you lose?

Putting the pieces together

I tend to take things I do lightly.

That's fine, until the day comes when you need to make a list and then I'm scrabbling to remember what I've done that is relevant.

It's like that with things I write. I make a list. Then I remember I wrote a chapter in a book published by RHP. Oh, and I know I've done articles for magazines. But can I remember which magazines, let alone which issues?

And it's like that with coproduction. It's time for me to make a list of what I've done, and I'm not sure where to start!

I have good reasons for resisting making lists. I hate people showing off what they've done, or treating themselves as more important because they can put more on their cv.

I have bad reasons for resisting making lists. I tend to dismiss anything I can do as being worthless. I fear being judged. I am too chaotic to be systematic about anything - and research relies heavily on being systematic.

Now I have a good reason to make a coproduction list. I'm going to the first meeting of people in South Wales who are interested in research and coproduction. To get and give the most, I need to marshal in my own brain what I've done, what I know, what I think, where I see research and coproduction in the future.

Blogging is one of my ways of thinking out loud and capturing that thinking. So here goes with an attempt to develop a timeline for my relationship with coproduction:

• went to a North Wales Working With Not To meet-up about coproduction and listened to Edgar Cahn
• went to hear Eddie Bartnik at a South Wales Coproduction Wales meet-up
• resisted when people started to call what Barod does 'coproduction' because I disliked the term
• worked out why I disliked how 'coproduction' was being used as a term, and found a way to explain what I want 'coproduction' to mean.
• worked with Constance of Wales Council for Voluntary Action on re-explaining 'coproduction' in terms that made sense to members of the public (Being At the Centre booklet)
• got involved with the ESRC research seminar series about academics, people with learning difficulties and practitioners researching together - and realised that it helped move things forward to combine thinking about inclusive/participatory research with coproduction thinking.
• Barod conceptualised what we mean by 'coproduction' in a slide show and workshop (thanks to Good Practice Exchange for giving us the chance to develop those, and Mel Nind for inviting us to adapt the slides for use in a research context at NRMF 2015)
• had a few exchanges with Professor Tony Bouvaird about coproduction
• kept developing ideas of ways to work together as equals within Barod, and between Barod and other organisations
• Barod explicitly 'did coproduction' with Jim Wright and Torfaen People First. We worked together from November 2016 to March 2017. I'm thinking through sociological stuff from my PhD, to see if I can explain why what we did felt like 'real coproduction'. We are also jointly writing up tips on 'doing coproduction'
• went to the launch for Coproduction Network Wales, and began to think it may be time to dip my toes into the formal side of developing coproduction as a public services practice in Wales.
• met Dr Gideon Calder to talk coproduction and ethics - and now have an invitation to the South Wales meet-up for people sharing an interest in coproduction and research.

Masked by that list is four years of thinking, reflecting, theorising and doing, which in itself draws on 20 years of thinking, reflecting, theorising and doing variations on 'working together' and 'consulting'.

I think it's possible to sum up the key things Barod and I have learned:

• you can't coproduce unless you can communicate freely
• you can't coproduce unless your shared vision is stronger than your desire for the familiar and personal comfort zone
• you can spot coproduction because anyone in the group can initiate anything (budget decisions, ideas, strategies, projects, parameters for working together, who should be involved), and everyone knows what the budget is
• coproduction isn't the only way to work together. Consultation and representation on boards are still important and valid.  What's vital is that we don't label something as 'coproduction' just because it sounds good or involves some form of working together.

And that's why the list is helpful. By putting together the list, it's helped me put the pieces together of what we have learned. And I reckon those four key points were worth the effort of making a list.

Welcoming myself home

It's a long time since I blogged.

This time a year ago, I didn't honestly think I would ever come back to my PhD. A lot has happened since then.

Here's the quick version:

• moved to Swansea
• husband (newly redundant) started exploring botanical papermaking. Quick plug for his Etsy shop and Twitter account
• have new supervisors and a new approach to the PhD
• work part time in Barod and study PhD part time
• just starting to regain confidence and find my feet

We've given me until the end of September to get back to having fun with theory, enjoy getting to know and think with new people, and play with concepts.

1st October is time enough to start thinking about the shape of the PhD and what information I will need. For now, I am happy, creative and (ironically perhaps) enjoying the freedom to make the connections that lead to long term research impact.

Along the way, and believe it or not, it's part of the playing, I'm going to have a go at consulting on a topic using three methods. To play fair, I'm reading up on how to do them so I can try to use the methods in the way they are intended. The terms Focus Group and World Cafe are banded around so loosely that it's been an eye-opener going back to literature about them. My third method is Barod's Coffee Shop Conversations. It's almost time for a blog about them - but not quite! I'm still working out quite how to explain them clearly. Let's just say for now that the Coffee Shop Conversations method is a world apart from other public consultation methods, but not a million miles from what some ethnographers get up to down the pub.

So, I'm back home. Back where I love. Back where I'm relaxed. Back using a blog to help me think aloud and letting me stash that thinking in a place where even I find it again.

Why do academics cite? And what can the Open Data teach us?

I like thinking and I like my thoughts. I learn by debating and discussing, especially with people who disagree or who approach a topic from a radically different perspective. I want to be able to order and lay out my thoughts to encourage further debate.

I don’t want to cite experts to justify my thinking, as if my thoughts have no value because I am not eminent. I do not want to hide behind experts in an attempt to abdicate personal responsibility for what I’ve written.

I do have to be careful in case the above is an excuse for trying to avoid citing because I find it difficult to develop the discipline of knowing where ideas have come from. I’m pretty eclectic and I’m getting old. I usually couldn’t tell you where I picked up an idea – it might have been a newspaper article, tweet, book I read in 1983, something overheard at a conference, a conversation, a lecture or something I scan-read when looking to see what others have read. And I’m not just eclectic, I also struggle to separate my immediate interaction with someone’s words and the words themselves.

But I digress. Whatever my beliefs and (limited) capability for citing, my thoughts are not my thoughts. They are a constantly evolving product of interaction with other thinkers. I need to keep notes so I can cite others in order to:

•  give credit to those co-creators (at all stages of research)
•  provide pointers to how my thinking evolved (when I get to the point of fixing my thinking in a thesis)
•  signpost people to things I think worth reading (at all stages of research)

We have an established academic route for citation when we interact with texts, with rules for how to cite within our writing and how to reference that citation in the bibliography. That’s fine if the knowing or unknowing co-creators of your thinking are written, disembodied texts. And it will be fine once I’ve learned the discipline of keeping accurate records…

There are newer rules for citing television programmes, videos, websites – almost anything can be cited as long as what we are citing could be accessed by others in the same way that we accessed it.

But what do we do when our co-creators are encountered not as written texts but as conversations, debates, email exchanges, tweets? My reasons for wishing to cite are as valid now as for any encounter I have with a written text.

Back in the 1980s when I wrote a science dissertation, it was permitted to cite the very occasional 'pers comm' if it came from a respected authority. One needed a strong argument for including a personal communication as, although it credited the person and directed you to someone of interest, it did not let other people reflect independently on that communication. In other words, how could others access the information, the data, that was being cited?

It’s at this point that my thoughts moved to the concept and language of Open Data. After all, what is a citation but a way to access data? And in Open Data Institute terms (http://theodi.org/blog/closed-shared-open-data-whats-in-a-name), data come as open, shared and closed. My data are 'things needing citation'

• Open is available to all on the same basis.
•  Shared is available to some (like publications behind a pay wall or personal communications).
•  Closed is private communication so shouldn’t be cited at all.

Some within the Open Data world argue that as much data as possible should be shifted to ‘open’ or ‘closed’, because ‘shared’ is where privileged is maintained through controlled access to information. (As I said, I’ve been ill-disciplined in documenting where I hear things; all I can say is my belief this is true comes from articles I’ve clicked through to from Twitter written by proponents of Open Data, and conversations over dinner before a Gov Camp with someone from an Open Data Institute. If anyone reading this wants to direct me to something I can cite, that would be amazing)

If the language of Open Data applies to things a researcher might want to cite, does Open Data thinking show us a way to move personal communications out of ‘shared’ and into ‘open’? Possibly. One route would be to shorten the time between finding something out or developing a new idea, and publishing about it. It might be fun if academics had a ‘please publish’ button on their blogs to help work out which blogs must urgently need refining from a work-in-progress into a publication. Or perhaps we need to revisit the status and purpose of blogs, but that would be the subject of a different blog.

Maybe, in this world of DOI (Digital Object Identifier; a code that means your information can be found even if the web address changes), there is scope for preparing a mutually acceptable version of any 'pers comm' and deliberately moving it out of the shadows into the ‘open’ by uploading it digitally in a way that complies with guidance on what makes ‘good open data’ (http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data).

This might make both parties think twice about how transparent they wish their communication to be. But if transparency is a problem, the communication probably needs to be shifted to the ‘closed’ category and therefore not cited at all.

I have no desire to undermine the status of peer reviewed published literature. When I write my thesis, they will take pride of place. But to fulfill my three purposes for citation, I will also need to cite beyond that, and that means I will need 

• a way to cite people and not just their texts
• a strategy for making sure anything I wish to cite complies with the principle of others being able to access what I've cited.

Discuss! 

What's in a word?

A reflection on Dave Snowden's public lecture title: 'Nudge not yank' and subsequent facebook conversation with James, Jules and the man himself

We use language to communicate. Sometimes words aren't enough, and pictures can do a better job. Sometimes we need metaphors or similes. 

Nudge and yank speak to me of movement. Movement and journeys are a common metaphor in behaviour change, and a common metaphor in everyday life too. So I've chosen to go with the 'journey' metaphor.

Quick note: Sometimes, before we can make sense of a detailed map, we need to get a rough idea of where we are heading. This blog is very much an attempt to sketch a 'map of Wales' level of detail. Once we've worked out roughly where we are heading, then we can dig out the detailed maps and StreetView to help us plan our journey.

So here's my go at defining nudge, yank (and couple more).

• I am at A and I want to be at B but it's hard. Please make it easier. Facilitate

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. So you try to stand in my shoes and work out how to gently push me to B. I may know that's what you are doing and allow myself to be budged (ethical) or be unaware (manipulation so not ethical). Nudge

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. It's a fair distance, so you try to stand in my shoes and push me hard in the direction of B. Shove.

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. You are already at B and don't try to think what it is like to be at A. You try to pull me towards B in one sudden move. Yank. 

Doing anything about the A to B journey assumes we know what A looks like, what B looks like, the distance between them and what the terrain is like in between A and B. My guess is that this is what SenseMaker is designed to do.

And then we have the issue that most nudge thinking is about changing the behaviour of a population, not an individual. Each person's A will be different (subtly or radically) from every other person's A.

Assuming we manage to understand A, B and the journey between them, our next task is to think of more reliable ways for people to get from A to B and, perhaps most importantly, decide whether it's any of our business.

Emacipatory research. Who is it for?

Barod volunteered to review a book edited by David Bolt, called 'Changing Social Attitudes Towards Disability'. The review has just been published by the journal Disability & Society  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2016.1167362 (if you can't get to it on the first link, try this one: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/hnpqssth8Pkh7eq29M69/full).

I hadn't reflected on what I had written for a while. What struck me re-reading it today is the strength of my feeling that accounts of emancipatory research are often inaccessible to those outside academic life, and that this is problematic.

In part, this is a problem shared with all critical qualitative social research. We want our research to create change, or we wouldn't be doing it. But we want our research to be validated as research, so we need to conform to the rules of the game. We end up needing to publish different accounts for different audiences, if we want our research to create change and be validated as research.

Is there evidence of this conundrum in emancipatory research? Yes, I think so.
How fundamental is the issue? I'm not sure.

For emancipatory research, it would be an issue if you only publish an academic account of your research and your research findings, unless the research is about/for emancipating academics.
Equally, it would be an issue if you publish something that could be earth-shattering but in a format that means it is never found (or, if found, misunderstood or dismissed) by those academics who could have wrestled with your ideas and the finding, and could have taken your work forward.

I'm not in the 'camp' that think 'academicese' (aka academic jargon) is bad. Learning 'academicese' can be valuable. Sometimes it is important to categorise and distinguish 50 different types of snow - in which case it is advisable to learn the vocabulary from a culture where types of snow are sufficiently important that they have developed the language needed to identify with precision each type of snow. Similarly in sociology and social research, it can be important to categorise and define far more precisely than in everyday life. Without technical language, it is very challenging to do this, and even more challenging to communicate your thoughts to others.

Bottom line is that we need to develop bilingualism between everyday types of speech and 'academicese'. We need to build a bilingual community, and to build translation/interpretation skills so that monoglots can participate in a bilingual environment.

All I can dream is that we learn how to be a strong academic/non-academic emancipatory community that holds together bilinguals and monoglots within one community. From my experience of living in Wales as a Welsh learner I am all too aware that this is an almost impossible challenge.

Talking to the GP

I've never tried talking to a GP about mental health before. 

There are many reasons, mostly because my work and life mean I've listened to GPs and other health professionals talking about people with mental health problems, and I've listened to people with mental health problems talking about GPs and other health professionals. Neither set of listenings have inspired confidence to even try talking to anyone in the NHS.

There's also my embarrassment, shame and sense of inadequacy that I've not self-managed my health adequately so need expert intervention. That's not specifically about mental health. I get the same feelings if I need to call on an expert for my asthma or eczema or a sports injury if I feel it's because of poor self-management. 

The fear factor for me was unique to mental health. It's one thing going to a GP and saying your asthma is uncontrolled. It's a different thing going to a GP and saying your anxiety (and voices) have exceeded your self-management skills. I was terrified that he'd hear the word 'voices' and hit the panic button.

But I went, taking my husband as my advocate. I went because I needed to get signed off work because I wasn't really safe to be there (for work read 'full time PhD student'). What being signed off also gives me is space where I don't need to do anything except focus on all the self-care things I need to do in order to get back to self-management. 

And for the first time, I accepted that I needed to bite the bullet and ask for some short term pharmaceutical help.

The appointment went well. I gave a three-point summary: my mental ill-health has exceeded my ability to self-manage; I need a medical note to give me a two month suspension of studies (which has already been agreed with the university), and I need something to take the edge off anxiety when it gets to the point I feel unsafe. 

And that excellent GP didn't miss a beat, didn't change his tone of voice, didn't even change his facial expression. He treated it just like my asthma or eczema had gone out of control. He asked a few relevant questions without sounding like he was reading from a script. He clearly knew about good self-management techniques (cos he checked I knew of them and was using the ones that worked for me!). He accepted my assessment of the situation (and my husband's filling in of details). He gave quick 'yes' answers to my two key points, ie there was no issue with the medical note and he had no problem with giving me a very small quantity of diazepam for short term use if/as needed. Then he talked with me a bit more about the longer term. And we agreed I would go to see him in two weeks so we could agree whether I'd got back to self-managing or, if not, for him to explain the longer term options.. 

I don't know how he came to be so excellent (I almost wonder if he has personal relevant experience), but three cheers for an excellent GP. By treating my illness as something as mundane as out-of-control asthma, he's helping me treat it that way too.