Open and Creative Climate platform
Working on the digital vision for Julie’s Bicycle
Julie’s Bicycle is a non-profit helping organisations in the arts and culture sector understand their carbon footprints. They’ve created a unique set of tools, the Creative Green Tools, as well as many high-impact programmes specifically to support the creative sector.
Over the last months, our vision for the digital transformation and strategic direction for Julie’s Bicycle (JB) has solidified. We are pleased to note that not only have we assisted Julie’s Bicycle in hiring their first ever Product Lead, we’ve also established a pathway and guideposts designed to help JB achieve a digital vision that will put them squarely in the column of digital leader for the climate crisis.
External vision
It should come as no surprise that We Are Open is encouraging JB to become an open organisation (we do this all the time!). We are advising they move forward with an OpenSaaS model and pair it with a community strategy in which they fly the flag of openness together with environmentalism.
The external development piece of this strategy details the community-driven approach and processes that will help Julie’s Bicycle grow strategically and sustainably. Key to this development is embedding the open approach, which will help JB bring its existing audience and help them to leverage community in ways which would significantly augment opportunities for Julie’s Bicycle.
We’ve used JB’s theory of change to create three distinct design principles for the digital work JB has on the horizon. With creativity, sustainability and solidarity, JB will design its tools and resources together with and for the cultural community. The “Creative Climate Digital Platform” will connect and make visible all climate action taking place in the cultural sector for advocacy and communications. This will enable users to communicate climate action and campaign/advocate to their own creative communities.
We will create an intersection between climate activism and technology by engaging with and inside of the Open Source community, and we will use these associations to foster peer to peer knowledge exchange, collaborative problem-solving, an opportunity to use and improve tools and resources and leadership in the climate tech space.
The overarching objectives for the community are to:
- Enable peer to peer knowledge sharing so that we are making all creative climate action visible, profiling emerging and established sector experts, encouraging collaborative problem-solving and leadership, supporting people to connect with each other and learn new and best practices, and co-create new knowledge with the sector directly.
- Make visible the global creative response to the climate challenge, enabling a coherent advocacy tool and a joined-up approach to creative climate action across the world.
Internal Vision
As an open mindset is not something that can be delivered by an Openness team but should be embedded across the organisation, we’ve created an internally focused strategy to help JB integrate the necessary tools and processes. This way of working will open new doors for staff as well as for external collaborators and partnerships.
We started by looking at the systems they use (e.g. a ‘System Ecosystem’) and thinking about ways digital could augment and support collaboration inside the organisation. We are considering the overlap between internal work practices and external engagement and planning for the remix and reuse of documentation for the good of the external strategy. We’re also advising on software choices that can help JB staff manage the complexity of JB’s work, both now and in the future.
We know that our way of working is becoming more common, but there are peculiarities in the world of non-profit that have to be taken into account when doing digital transformations towards openness. Though still works in progress, we are establishing the groundwork to help JB staff learn about open principles and practices. We are preparing ourselves for a deeper engagement on these topics in 2022.
Next year
We are pleased that JB is eager to continue working with us and are thus beginning to write phase plans for 2022. On the tools side of things, we are still collaborating closely with our friends at Outlandish. Together we will be supporting JB as the organisation begins its journey through the double diamond and into the world of open source.
Wondering how We Are Open can help your organisation on the path to digital transformation? Get in touch!
