What makes communities so difficult to reach for digital inclusion and local history projects? In our new blog post, we take a dive into the obstacles we faced when working with a housing association to put together a digital community history project in Oldham.
Link: https://gfsc.studio/blog/2023/raftt-design-blog-2/
#community #digitalInclusion #communityHistory #oldham #localHistory #archives
We found that data protection legislation made it very difficult to engage with participants! While data existed on people who had been living in the towers, the appropriate permissions weren't gathered at the time, and GDPR restrictions meant weren't allowed to use this contact information to reach former residents.
The most successful outreach was on-the-ground events in the community, and word-of-mouth about the project from the housing association we partnered with. We did manage to engage some key storytellers, but there were many more potential participants we could identify but just weren't allowed to contact — like those on local history Facebook groups.
To read the full blog post, head here: https://gfsc.studio/blog/2023/raftt-design-blog-2/. If you'd like to support us in delivering community history projects in future, we'd really appreciate your contributions on Ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/gfscstudio