Set up by the Department of Communities and Local Government, The Digital Inclusion Team (DIT) focuses on how the innovative application of digital technologies, of any kind, can improve the lives and life chances of socially excluded people and deprived neighbourhoods in England. The Digital Inclusion Team had identified that social housing was well placed to engage with the digital inclusion agenda but that good practice was unevenly distributed across the sector. They therefore required a workshop that would bring social housing professionals together, share best practice and develop approaches to digital inclusion in social housing.

FSquared delivered a workshop for the Digital Inclusion Team (DIT) with representatives from the social housing sector and associated bodies. The objective was to deliver a facilitated and creative event with relevant professionals, related to the opportunities offered by digital inclusion, and to best practice attempts to design out digital exclusion.

Our approach to these workshops is informed by workshops that we have facilitated elsewhere and is led by a team that is experienced in facilitation, action learning and creativity sessions. The workshop was organised, designed and delivered by FSquared. We designed this workshop around the following key principles:

Twenty-seven people attended the event with facilitation and support from three representatives from FSquared. Seven attendees agreed to act as expert witnesses for one exercise, including representatives from: Homes and Communities Agency; Solihull Community Housing; Stratford City Council; Community Innovation UK; DigiTV; and the DIT. The remaining delegates comprised 15 social housing representatives from across England and 4 Local Authority attendees, including a Tenant Services Authority representative.

The workshop design was structured to allow people to fact find, rather than to be passive recipients of information, and to help them apply it, so that they could carry that information back into later group configurations, and use the information to build and apply to ideas throughout the day. The workshop design was built around the biographies of five members of a fictitious family (the Googles), and of a Housing Officer. Each workshop participant was allocated a character and a family group for the day, the aim being to create a vehicle wherein a range of social and digital exclusion and professional issues could be explored. Workshop exercises were recorded to encapsulate thought processes throughout the day.

The group engaged fully with the event, exploring the information available to them from all sources, and actively applying it to creative sessions wherein best practice and experience was shared. The process culminated in them testing their ideas for viability, by building them and adding detail; testing them with others; identifying which were quick wins and which were ‘slow grows’; and recording their findings on action planning sheets, which formed a section of the final report.

The Benefits

There are several benefits to be gained by getting social housing professionals together in a facilitated workshop such as this. For example the workshop enabled:

Overall, the workshops enabled strong, approaches to digital inclusion in social housing to be discussed, developed and action planned. The workshop findings are being developed into a report to be shared broadly within the housing sector and within central government