2019 Year in Review & Look Forward to 2020
2019 was a year of global and local collaborations, diversifying our membership and programs, and growing our team behind it all! In the spirit of living our values of transparency and continuous learning, in this post we continue our tradition of an annual Year in Review and Look Forward to next year.
2019 HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT WE DID (AND LEARNED ALONG THE WAY)
Open Gov Hub exists to be the most dynamic and impactful possible meeting place that we can be, which brings together resources, organizations, and ideas for shared impact. In addition to expanding our member network, 2019 was marked by several special initiatives:
Restructured and expanded our team! In 2019, we hired an amazing team: Operations Manager (Bruce), Program Manager (Izabela), and Atlas Corps Global Partnerships Fellow (Anastasia).
Concluded our 2-year Defending Democracy: Lessons from Around the World Program, which included 9 convenings and the production of 12 case studies, all highlighting lessons from other countries’ experiences for defending U.S. democracy. This work culminated with the recent launch of our Defending Democracy website.
Published our 2nd Edition Guide to Great Events, with tons of free resources to help raise the quality of convenings, like 8 Universal Principles for Great Events, an Event Organizer’s toolkit of 15 Event Types, a Facilitator’s Toolkit of 20 Interactive Exercises, and more.
Implemented a variety of officewide improvements to our physical coworking space, including a noise mitigation project (sound panelings and white noise machines) and an environmental sustainability initiative (establishing a recycling and composting station and switching entirely away from paper cups to mugs, helping divert hundreds of bags of waste from landfills)
Launched Open Gov Stories - A Global Podcast Series, featuring more than 20 episodes (recorded in 8 countries), which go behind the scenes to explore why leaders in our field care about changing the world and do the work they do. (Available anywhere you find podcasts.)
Formalized for the first time a Global Affiliate Hubs Program, running a wide variety of 90+ activities with 6 Global Affiliate Hubs this year, all with the goal of supporting hubs’ sustainability and increasing our individual and collective impact through peer learning.
In addition to these special initiatives, we updated existing tools and experimented with new ones to help foster collaborations across our network:
Most notably, 2019 was the first time we ran two separate Collaboration Funds of $10,000 each. We’ve long known that some promising collaborations simply can’t come to life because of the lack of resources. So this year we piloted Open Gov Hub Collaboration Funds - one for our members in D.C. and the other for Global Affiliate Hubs - in a competitive process that provided seed funding for high-potential, short-term joint projects between two or more organizations.
Created two new Social Network Maps (using Kumu) that visualize links based on the top functions and keywords that describe organizations in our updated Member Database.
Produced new Member Database visualizations that give us an updated snapshot of trends in our growing community as a whole.
Thanked the outgoing 2018-19 Member Council and welcomed the new 2019-20 Member Council, a 10-person advisory group made up of individuals at the Hub who lead collaborative initiatives, decide on new members, and advise on how we can best implement the Hub strategy.
How are all these efforts to maximize connections panning out? A recent member survey provided helpful insights:
76% learned something new, made a new connection, or changed how they work as a result of attending an event
88% feel a sense of shared identity with other Hubbers (outside their organization)
90% benefit from being part of the Hub
94% see Open Gov Hub as more than a shared office space
And as a testament to our community culture, now, for the first-time collaborations occur more frequently than ever before - on a weekly basis!
A few testimonials from this survey explain the culture more:
“We’ve received constant inspiration and support around different projects”
“The Hub is a very unique, welcoming place in a city that is often driven by what you do, who you work for, and how you are a connection. I have met some of my greatest friends here!”
This year, we also identified key lessons about our work:
While WeWork’s failed initial public offering (IPO) captured many headlines and may have raised concerns about the viability of coworking long-term, we developed a sound business and social-change model early on, and membership at our humble space continues to grow. A slow and steady approach to growth, with a focus on a niche theme and targeted community, has served us well, despite the increase in commercial coworking options in recent years.
Intentional relationship-building and peer-learning activities can go a long way in addressing chronic burnout in the nonprofit sector. At our first-ever Global Affiliates Retreat, participants anonymously completed a personal burnout assessment. Just 4 short days of training, relationship-building, and peer learning translated to a reduction in the average burnout score. Knowing that you are not alone in facing the challenges of ambitious work can be very reassuring.
One way we can better serve our members is by offering more universal professional development and educational opportunities (e.g., building skills like productivity and project management) not only events that focus on increasing open-gov related content expertise
We compiled key learnings from events about our four Program Themes for 2019
A little seed money can provide a helpful excuse for existing partners to take their relationship to the next level and formalize a joint project. Several winners of our Collaboration Fund seed grants already knew each other and considered working together before, but just a bit of funding enabled them to prioritize a joint project amidst a sea of other competing tasks.
From the Defending Democracy Program, we learned from other countries that polarization is likely the single greatest threat to American Democracy. Case study analysis showed that the urge to win at any cost is doing more to undermine democracy than almost anything else. Deep polarization can have wide-ranging, damaging consequences, from contributing to economic collapse (Venezuela) to stifling free exchange of ideas in the media (India), skewing a should-be independent and apolitical judiciary (Poland), and contributing to mob violence (France and Sri Lanka). Without some common ground or recognition of the mutual legitimacy of different viewpoints, democratic institutions cease to function.
3 SNAPSHOTS OF IMPACT
Shared Staffing: Knowing that people/talent are every organization’s most valuable resource, we continued to foster shared staffing arrangements in 2019 through hiring and referral support to many organizations. We also were happy to see several of our part-time, work-trade Hub Staff (Community Catalysts) directly hired by member organizations!
Unique Collaboration: Measuring the impact of social change work is always difficult, especially when you are working for complex systems change. Through our Collaborative Learning Seed Fund, two members - Collaborating for Resilience (CoRe) and Akvo - received a $5,000 grant to partner on a one-month sprint to help CoRe update its theory of change to better understand how different actors behave differently as a result of CoRe’s work building dialogue among groups competing over scarce environmental resources. This short but valuable project is building a foundation for follow-up collaboration, and for an updated Monitoring,Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Framework for CoRe, as a whole.
Global Scaling and Partnerships: 2019 was a year of massive expansion of our work with Global Affiliate Hubs. As a result of the 90+ activities with our 6 Global Affiliate Hub partners, we are beginning to see promising results. The Global Affiliate Hubs reported increases in membership, programs, and events, as well as an increased sense of solidarity. That means that collaboration opportunities also increased for members of their respective communities. They also feel more consolidated in the global fight against civic space pressures than before the program. While helping the hubs with their recruitment strategies, budgets, and designing new spaces and programs and more, we focused both on offering practical tools and moral support to help Global Affiliate Hubs thrive.
2020: LOOKING FORWARD
In the new year, we look forward to focusing on three new Program Themes for 2020:
Working to Depolarize Media, Political, and Civic Spaces (including in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. elections).
Adapting to More Inclusive and Locally Led International Development (including reflecting on 5-year progress on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16).
Supporting Citizen Action Against Corruption.
In addition to these themes, we are looking forward to the following:
Implementing a partnership with Columbia University’s Picker Center (at the School of International and Public Affairs) to develop an online course based on our existing Introduction to Open Government Training. This will help make this content accessible to civil servants in more places (not only to delegations who can physically participate in study visits to Washington, D.C.).
Building on lessons from the Defending Democracy program and continuing to foster cross-country comparative learnings about successes and challenges to protect democratic norms and institutions under threat.
Evolving the Global Affiliate Hubs program. After a major year of program experimentation in 2019, we are looking forward to exploring new partners, resources, high-impact activities, and possibly even developing a social franchise model to further scale the work.
Launching a new media lab - including state-of-the-art audio and video equipment for podcasting, livestreaming events, and more - to enhance how the work of our members and partners can be highlighted through more diverse, engaging, and accessible media.
What’s more, we are excited to plan for the longer-term future of our D.C. coworking space, responding to the high demand we’ve in recent years (with 95-100% occupancy of our space for the last 4 years)!
By continuing to work together in increasing breadth and depth, we all can achieve far more than the sum of our parts. We hope you will join us as we move onward and upward in the new year!
