About
A place-based social lab
We are a place-based social lab. An experimental form of social and imagination infrastructure in Dudley. We have a networked structure. In other words, we’re not an organisation. (We are hosted by Dudley CVS).
There are three layers to our networked structure which we carefully tend:
There is a team leading the lab, who share the role of Network Guardians.
Our team convene a network of organisations and local people.
We work within a wider field or ecosystem of people and initiatives in the UK pioneering emerging futures.
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Lab team
We are a transdisciplinary team with experience and knowledge of a range of practices and approaches. We bring these together into collaborative efforts to generate shifts towards flourishing futures.
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A network of Time Rebels
CoLab Dudley convenes local people, doers and creatives of all kinds, to develop experiments and projects which invite collective imagination and cultural action. We call them Time Rebels.
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Wider ecosystem
We collaborate and connect with fellow social and cultural pioneers who are reimagining and redesigning the world, seeding and building alternatives, and working to achieve deep, transformative change.
“Networks offer a new way of working to navigate our complex world. Rather than tackling issues in isolation, impact networks combine the forces of many different people and organisations to make progress together, even when the way forward is unclear.”
— Converge
Our GUIDEing Principles
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Nurture connections
We nurture meaningful connections between people, with place, and with the rest of nature.
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Invite curiosity
We invite curiosity to nurture the conditions for collectively imagined futures.
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Learn by doing
We learn by doing together through hands-on creative experiments and action testing out future possibilities.
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Seek living systems health
We cultivate ways to care as beings in complex living systems which we are dependent upon.
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Be good ancestors
We champion and act with care for our planet and future generations.
Most initiatives use some kind of learning or evaluation approach. Historically this has tended to occur as things end. But if your work is responding to emerging opportunities and challenges, and changing contexts, it is pretty tricky and more importantly not very helpful if all the learning is at the end.
What if instead you learn as you go? And you involve everyone in the learning? And you share that learning as part of an open and transparent commitment to work out loud?
What if you based your evaluation on your shared values? Values that you have agreed will help guide your work towards a long-term aspirations without boxing you into a corner before you really understand what you are dealing with? This is what Principles-Focused Evaluation is all about. Effective values based principles are designed to be GUIDEing:
(G) (offer meaningful) guidance - informing priorities and oriented towards action.
(U) useful - doable, feasible, supporting choices and decisions.
(I) inspiring - ethically grounded and important, evoking a sense of purpose.
(D) developmentally adaptable - enduring, sensitive to context and adaptable in complexity.
(E) evaluable - help you document and judge whether you’ve followed it, what has resulted, and if it is taking you in the desired direction.
Our GUIDEing principles help guide us both on a day-to-day and long-term thinking basis. Importantly, they help guide HOW we do not just WHAT we do. The process or journey is as important as the outcome or the destination.