Putting community assets into community hands

It’s no small feat, but can access to data make it easier for groups to organise?

This month DCC have been on the road visiting London, Glasgow and Birmingham to learn about how community groups use and need data to access community assets around them.

Communities looking to save or secure land and buildings as community assets face significant challenges. From building relationships with the right stakeholders, to understanding the planning considerations on the plot, finding information is hard. Often data is fragmented, opaque, out of date, and hard to access. Yet the right data in the right places can make life easier for communities and groups to organise. 

Shared Assets and Digital Commons are currently working together to gather perspectives from community groups on the data and digital tools they need to successfully take on assets. On our side, we’re seeking to explore what small improvements might have a significant impact toward supporting communities and organisers to put more assets into the hands of communities. We’re coming in with a ‘tech skeptical’ approach - we’re confident that most of the time technology isn’t the right answer. 

We’re hearing that the land ownership information offered on LandExplorer is really useful, and could be more useful if it was more searchable. Other ideas that we’re hearing are around making the information easier to understand and share with less tech-literate members of the group would be helpful - like printable pdfs. Access to planning information, building classifications, local zoning and relevant local authority contacts would be potentially powerful organising tools. 

A common theme that emerges is that data that exists in governments and local authorities is difficult to access. So much data exists, but is not public. This forces groups to do FOI requests, which creates a sense of antagonisation or ‘us and them’. This is further exacerbated when community groups are working toward aims that local authorities outline across their values or strategy documents, but then are forced to prioritise revenue over these other outcomes. 

Between November and February we’ll be designing small feature improvements and testing them with workshop participants so they can be implemented. If you’d like to follow this process and the updates as they go live, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter!