How to Use the Building Digital Communities Stakeholder Survey
Digital Dodge City (a result of Building Digital Communities: Pilot) began engaging stakeholders in April 2013 through in-person meetings and an online survey. Full description of the stakeholder engagement is available in the article Steps 1 and 2 of Building Digital Communities.
The online survey was used to determine the extent of stakeholder alignment and misalignment as the Digital Dodge City was launching. 101 stakeholders completed the survey. Most of the respondents completed the survey during the in-person meetings. Participants were given iPads to complete the online survey. The local leadership team and the national support team (OCLC, Waymark Systems and University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana Center for Digital Inclusion) provided support as needed, reading the questions for a blind participant and providing technical support to participants not familiar with iPads.
The survey was extremely valuable in exposing the in-person meeting participants to the various impacts and complexities of community members' access and use (or lack of access and use) of information technology. The online survey gave participants an opportunity to think about digital inclusion prior to the verbal discussion. One member of the local leadership team noted that she did not know the answers to some of the questions in the survey but being asked the questions in the survey caused her to think about aspects of digital inclusion she had not previously considered.
The online survey was also instrumental in identifying potential roadblocks to digital inclusion efforts in Dodge City. The concerns noted in the survey were taken into consideration by the local leadership team and their support at OCLC when structuring future stakeholder engagement, the message of the initiative, and the demonstration projects.
The survey questions are available for your use. The survey questions are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license which lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as OCLC is credited and new creations are licensed under the identical terms. If you do use any portion of the survey questions, please share with us your experience and lessons learned.
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