Real Good Social Infrastructure Collaborative

The Real Good Social Infrastructure Collaborative is being developed as the part of Real Good that works explicitly on the design of social infrastructure.

Its purpose is to understand and improve the structures through which connection, agency, collective capability, coordination and institutional learning become possible.

Broad concepts such as community, engagement and impact can become too imprecise once you try to design around them. A person attending an event, developing a trusted relationship, gaining greater practical agency, joining a collaborative project, or contributing insight that changes an institution may all be described as forms of engagement, yet each represents a different kind of change.

The Collaborative develops more precise models for those differences and tests whether they are useful in practice.

Current capability architecture

Connect → Relate → Effectuate → Uplift → Mobilise → Achieve → Reform → Elevate

Connect concerns the creation of meaningful social contact.

Relate concerns the development of relationships through which trust, mutual understanding and support can grow.

Effectuate concerns practical agency: whether people are better able to understand possibilities and act on them.

Uplift concerns the development of capability itself.

Mobilise concerns bringing multiple people and capabilities into useful coordination.

Achieve concerns translating coordinated capability into beneficial action.

Reform concerns the point at which accumulated insight and capability contribute to organisational or institutional change.

Elevate concerns strengthening the wider social infrastructure from which further capability can emerge.

Its purpose is analytical: to make different kinds of capability visible enough to design for, compare and evaluate.

What the Collaborative works on

Programme architecture

How different activities contribute to different forms of capability.

Measurement

How connection, participation, agency and collective capability can be examined in ways that capture the full depth of what they produce.

Community insight

How distributed experience can be synthesised into useful social knowledge.

Institutional connection

How community-derived insight can become useful to organisations with the ability to respond.

Operating models

How social infrastructure can be stewarded sustainably over time.

Replication

What should remain locally specific and what can become reusable across different contexts.

Real Good Communities provides the first practical environment in which this work can be tested. The Collaborative develops models and methods; the community provides the conditions in which those models can be challenged by real participation.

The value of the architecture depends on whether it helps us notice something useful, design something better, or understand more clearly what our work is actually producing.

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