About our Infographic

Page 39 of the report How can we govern cities differently? The promise and practices of co-production is an infographic, counting the ingredients that made Jam and Justice possible. This guide to the infographic comes from our ESRC-funded impact officer, Iona Hine, who fills in the details and explains some of the decisions necessary to make our activities countable:

4 institutions

The University of Sheffield
The University of Manchester
The University of Birmingham
Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation

2 funding bodies

The UK Economic and Social Research Council (Urban Transformations programme)
Mistra Urban Futures (based in Gothenburg, Sweden)

£1m research investment

This is a medium-sized sum for an academic research project, where research funding provides for professional staff support and infrastructure overheads as well as researcher salaries. It includes match funding from the partner universities as well as Mistra Urban Futures.

15 recruits & their networks

As explained on page 9 of the report, 50 people applied to join the Action Research Collective (ARC). 15 co-researchers were selected as ARC members. Their professional and personal connections had a significant influence on the direction of our work together. Other applicants have also supported our work as it progressed.

1 Action Research Collective

The central role of the Action Research Collective was to take decisions about the individual ARC projects. The ARC included the 15 recruits plus the paid academic and professional support team. We’ll be sharing more of the ARC’s learning with a detailed interactive timeline, due for release in late 2019.

2 pilot projects

While the ARC were agreeing on the pathways for decision-making Jam and Justice trialled small-scale projects with Manchester BME Network and Romiley People.

10 ARC projects

The ARC chose 10 ideas to be developed into test and learn projects. Read about them in detail here.

22 partner organisations

The scale of work undertaken in Jam and Justice would not have been possible without the contributions of our delivery partners, paid and voluntary. This list focuses on those with a formal role in supporting our work:

Amity: delivery partner for GM Decides and Coalitions for Change

At The Moment Productions: delivery partner for GM Decides and Coalitions for Change

BME Network: delivery partner for pilot project

Broughton Trust: co-delivery partner for The System Doesn’t Work

Carbon Coop (with Energy Democracy GM): delivery partner for the People’s Republic of Energy

Chrysalis Community Centre: co-delivery partner for The System Doesn’t Work

Centre for Local Economic Strategies: delivery partner for People’s Procurement

Collaborate Out Loud: consultancy for the Inquiry into Care at Home

Community Pride CIC: delivery partner for The System Doesn’t Work

GM Low Carbon Hub (with Green Summit Steering Group): stakeholders involved in Co-Producing the Green Summit

GM Social Value Network: consultancy and additional delivery for People’s Procurement

Greater Manchester Combined Authority: lead partner for Developing Co-Productive Capacities

Jericho Solutions: desk-based research support for social innovations

Just Space: consultancy for Space in Common

National Association of Neighbourhood Management: delivery partner for Jam and Justice Treasure Hunt

North West Employers: delivery partner for Testing the 21st Century Councillor framework

Quantum: evaluation partner for Co-Producing the Green Summit

Rike Sitas African Centre for Cities: policy official recruitment and facilitation for comparative analysis work

Romiley People: delivery partner for pilot project

Shared Future CIC: delivery partner for the Inquiry into Care at Home

The Children’s Society: delivery partner for Young People Missing from Decisions

The Democratic Society: delivery partner for Space in Common

11 creative and media partners

Alice Toomer-McAlpine: video and creative documentation (various)

Amy Clancy: design of Jam and Justice logo (2016), Transform GM (2019), and People's Procurement report (at CLES, 2019)

Britt Jurgensen: Theatre maker and creative facilitator, People’s Republic of Energy

Ciaran McAuley: design for Transform GM interactive map and website (2018)

Creative Concern: design of Jam and Justice leaflet (2018) and How can we govern cities differently? (2019)

Dan Farley: design of Everyday Politics exhibition and booklets (2018), and Life Lessons report and appendix (2019)

Happen CIC: co-facilitation for Coalitions for Change.

Impact.sci: Co-Producing the City (2019)

Nick Harrison: photography for project launch (2016)

Open Access Government: “How social innovation can support citizen participation” (2019)

Rhizome: facilitation for ARC project co-design decisions day (2017)

98 co-researchers

10 contributors to Everyday Politics (including one who did not exhibit)

7 members of the GM Decides partnership group

18 action researchers enrolled in the People's Republic of Energy

3 consulting co-researchers in People's Procurement

2 associates at North West Employers

2 associates at Shared Future CIC

1 facilitator at Collaborate Out Loud

7 members of the Care at Home reference group

11 inquirers during the Care at Home Inquiry

3 participation professionals at The Children's Society

10 young researchers in Young People Missing from Decisions

2 action researchers from The Democratic Society

1 independent researcher supporting Transform GM

4 co-hosts in the Young People & Co-Production network

2 desk-based research assistants

And the Action Research Collective!

19 ARC meetings

At time of recruitment, the estimate was that the ARC would meet roughly once each quarter. You can see how meetings evolved in the report timeline. This statistic also includes the facilitated co-design days, a key part of the ARC’s activity.

4 methods sessions

Briefings on different research methods were provided for ARC members and other co-researchers.

128 research sessions

This number represents the core work across the different ARC projects. It includes project workshops, meetings of the different action research teams, and planning meetings for Coalitions for Change, as well as the data jam and design trace sessions undertaken by ARC members.

29 briefings and guest talks – actually 52!

This category records closed-door meetings with key decision-makers, to consult and/or brief on progress with a project or related activity. The category name also includes times when Jam and Justice was a guest on the agenda at someone else’s event, but alas, I forgot to do our sums. We logged 23 guest talks, so a real total would be at least 52.

24 organised events for wider audiences

These are events organised by Jam and Justice (including ARC members) to share information about Jam and Justice. This category includes: open labs run to explore methods and questions; project launch and report launch; a workshop on Participatory Urban Governance; a Manchester Histories debate on Double Devolution; 3 workshops with Gothenburg city region officials, and one with the International Observatory for Participatory Democracy in Barcelona; a treasure hunt with the National Association for Neighbourhood Management; two open events linked to the Care at Home project; Coalitions for Change activities including co-design and the first Action Learning Sets; a Young People and Co-Production networking session co-hosted with The Children’s Society; and a presentation to Swedish social work students.

9 socials and field trips

From festive meals to international delegations, this includes outings to Scotland, Barcelona, and Zizzi’s.

Over 8000 person hours

This is time spent together—whether in meetings or other kinds of activity. We have counted the person hours behind all the 237 activities logged above. If Jam and Justice was merely a guest in the space (e.g. to deliver a 45-minute workshop at a full day event) then we’ve calculated according to the number of direct participants and the amount of direct time. Some of the projects used team conference video calling as a standard way to stay in touch so we counted that here, but if it was just a catch-up phone call we haven’t counted it. We haven’t counted meetings where only the salaried project team were present (as e.g. events with academic audiences, or administrative meetings).

More than 700 individuals engaged

By “engaged” we mean that the individual made a meaningful contribution to the activity. This figure includes people who gave concrete support to the original bid, and individuals who came and took part in any of the activities logged above - right from the launch and labs in 2016 to the preparation period for National Co-Production Week in 2019 (but not including people who have signed up to participate in July). It also includes people who responded to the telephone survey for Transform GM, and (where known) people who have taken part in GM Decides listening sessions exploring their experience of decision-making spaces, plus people who’ve taken a Power in the City walk. It included many of the people on our mailing list providing their email address includes their name; although most of them also took part in other ways (and so are already in the figures elsewhere).

We used names, and occasionally organisational links, to identify unique individuals. (In 3.5 years, quite a few contacts changed roles.)

We have not included people whose names we don’t know, because where people take part repeatedly, we might end up double counting them. That means, for example, that we have not counted 138 young people who filled out the Missing from Decisions survey—though they definitely did take part.

We also did not count our 900-odd Twitter followers (unless they were participating in another way too). We welcome online engagement, but it can be hard to decide what kind of connection is meaningful in virtual space.

Here’s a rough idea of how those numbers break down across our different strands of activity:

People’s Republic of Energy: 98 names known; ca. 45 multiple unknown
People’s Procurement: 41 names known
Transform GM: 33 names known
Young People Missing from Decisions: 27 names known; ca. 130 unknown
Testing the 21st Century Councillor framework: 56 names known (not counting 27 contacts who didn’t make it to a focus group)
Space in Common: 38 names known
GM Decides: 13 names known; ca. 15 unknown
The System Doesn’t Work: 13 names known
Care at Home: 45 names known; not counting sign-ups who did not take part
Labs and ARC applicants: 79 names known
GMCA officers and role holders: 36 names known
BME Network Pilot project: 24 names known
Romiley People Pilot project: 60 names known
Manchester Histories debate: 7 names known (panellists)
Young People and Co-Production peer networking: 22 names known
Coalitions for Change: 63 names known
UK contacts beyond Greater Manchester: 44 names known
Bid supporters: 16 names known
Fieldtrip / exchange international participants: 43 names on record; we are still counting this figure
Mailing list: 86 names known; some not known

More than 200 organisations reached

We normally offer people the chance to tell us about their organisational links, and when they do we assume that the organisation has been reached. That includes where people have signed up to receive emails from us. This list includes connections made by and through the different ARC projects. If that seems like a soft approach to counting reach, note that the number of organisations on our list is nearly 300, and that we haven’t counted organisations we tried to reach out to that didn’t respond. You didn’t ask, but we’ll tell you (in no particular order):

Because the project has spanned 3.5 years, and the ARC projects within it have run with a large degree of autonomy, it is likely that some of the organisations mentioned above will have limited cultural memory of having encountered Jam and Justice. That’s one of the reasons it made sense to limit our claim to ‘over 200’ rather than ‘nearly 300’. At the same time, it is evident that individuals may only tell us one organisational link while they take their learning away and apply it in other settings too. So the figures offered are intended as a realistic report of our reach.

Making these kinds of calculations is a messy business. Each ARC project has taken a different approach to participation, and that means thinking carefully about what it means to take part, and how that can be counted. There’s also a risk of over-counting, because some individuals participated in multiple projects and project activities.

And because most of this calculation work began in late 2018 (after I arrived in post as impact officer), sometimes the available written records were unclear. Consider, for example, the difference between who signs up to attend an event, and who actually attends. In those cases, we looked for additional evidence, including testimony, photographs, social media posts, and video footage. And exercised caution.

There’s also an important question about whose time is valued and how. Internally there was debate about how to report hours of input. Does time given in-kind differ from salaried time? Or is the commitment to be in the room important in itself? Are other kinds of communication equivalent to time spent in a room? (Of course, much of the activity involved in sustaining a project as complex as this remains invisible: we have not attempted to count emails or telephone calls, or WhatsApp messages, etc.)

Why does counting matter?

If our goal is to change cities, we still need to be realistic about scale and it makes sense to report reliably on how far our resources have stretched. A colleague memorably compared our work to a gnat biting a hippo’s bottom, in hope of changing the river’s course.

The question also belongs to a wider discussion about how we report effectively on the process, outcomes and impact of co-production. As the published report makes clear, co-production requires real commitment. It is therefore inevitable that while those who have experienced it will narrate the power of change in personal terms, a wider demand to somehow prove its value emerges. What matters it that the process for showing value does not become a bureaucratic burden, but is properly connected to the work itself. For us, there is something to celebrate in recognising how many people we have reached, and seeing that as a proxy to calculate the scale of what is now happening as a result. Some impacts are not countable!

What Jam and Justice has achieved is only partially reflective of what can be made possible by a research investment of one million pounds. The reality is that the project has also benefitted from the passion and dedication of those involved to work for social justice, qualities you cannot quantify to report on a balance sheet.

For those interested to know more about Jam and Justice thinking around the challenges of measuring co-production, check out the provocation from Durose et al, Craft Metrics to Value Co-Production, Nature 562, pp. 32-33 (2018).

And if you have questions about this data, send an email to i.hine@sheffield.ac.uk.