Dublin City Council – Designing a New Consultation & Participation Process for Disabled Persons Organisations
Studio Notes | What We’ve Been Up To
We’ve been working with the Human Resources and Corporate Services and Transformation Departments of Dublin City Council, helping design a new process for consultation with Disabled Person’s Organisations (DPOs). Under the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, these organisations have special rights to consultation on decisions which might affect their lives.
To date we have worked with representatives of Disabled Persons Organisations, staff from Dublin City Council, and elected members of Dublin City Council, to incorporate perspectives from every side of this important process.
Interviews
We conducted one-to-one interviews with representatives from four different Disabled Persons’ Organisations, with Dublin City Council internal staff, each representing a different section of the council, and with four elected councillors where we learned about their experience with consultations as well as the work they do representing disabled constituents.
Altogether we gained a 360 degree perspective on what is needed from a new consultation process, and identified common challenges and opportunities for improvement. We shared these insights, and challenge areas with all of our collaborators.
Co-Creation Workshops
We subsequently designed and hosted inclusive online co-creation workshops, allowing representatives from all groups work together to come up with ideas. We got lots of input, and ideas which might help Dublin City Council to “closely consult with and actively involve” Disabled Persons Organisation in their decision-making processes.
Overall, these workshops were highly constructive with all sides enthusiastically contributing ideas, and collaborating towards an outcome that would suit everybody.
Next up
The design of this new consultation process is currently ongoing, with an aim to finalise a prototype in time to be trialled in the new year. A number of relevant projects have been identified where the prototype process will be implemented. At that stage, we’ll work with the various teams in Dublin City Council, and the other stakeholders involved, to monitor the implementation of the process, and to iterate and improve upon the service based on what we’ve learned.
Watch this space…
(Background image credit: William Murphy, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)