Phase 1: What is the RINGO Social Lab Process?

The RINGO Social Lab con­sists of a sus­tained two-year process which brings togeth­er change mak­ers from across the world, pro­mot­ing joint inno­va­tion and action for sys­temic change.

The phi­los­o­phy of the social lab is that no sin­gle per­son under­stands all facets of an issue nor has the per­fect solu­tion to exist­ing chal­lenges. This means there is val­ue in col­lab­o­rat­ing to find answers togeth­er, and so the Lab’s host­ing team has cre­at­ed an envi­ron­ment that offers sup­port, tools and ded­i­cat­ed time for mean­ing­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion.

The intent of the RINGO Social Lab is to address three things:

• what we want out of glob­al civ­il soci­ety more broad­ly
• what that would look like from an insti­tu­tion­al per­spec­tive
• to iden­ti­fy what may need to change in the wider sys­tem and col­lec­tive­ly work towards that

A social lab has a strong exper­i­men­tal ori­en­ta­tion and Lab Mem­bers have been invit­ed to bring their ques­tions and full curios­i­ty to the research and learn­ing phase of the jour­ney.

Through a process of col­lec­tive sense-mak­ing they will then design pro­to­types that express a re-imag­i­na­tion of the INGO sys­tem. Test­ing these pro­to­types in teams will enable find­ing out, prac­ti­cal­ly, how to lever­age the changes we want to see.

RINGO Lab Mem­bers attend a series of online work­shops, which build rela­tion­ships and sol­i­dar­i­ty between par­tic­i­pants. In-between these work­shops, Mem­bers work in small­er teams, clus­tered at dif­fer­ent times by region, theme or pro­to­type.

Along­side this work in teams, Mem­bers gain indi­vid­ual coach­ing and sup­port to strength­en their lead­er­ship for inno­va­tion.

Through­out this process, RINGO aims to build a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty beyond the core group of par­tic­i­pants to the broad­er glob­al civ­il soci­ety ecosys­tem.

TIMELINE

March-May 2021: Incep­tion & Con­ven­ing Phase – onboard­ing of Social Lab Mem­bers, online plat­forms cre­at­ed and Incep­tion Work­shop com­plet­ed, with Inquiry Clus­ters formed and ini­ti­at­ed.

May-August 2021: Dis­cov­ery Phase – Col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of the ‘cur­rent state of stuck­ness’, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for trans­for­ma­tion cre­at­ed via the­mat­ic clus­ter work, with accom­pa­ni­ment by coach­es.

Sep­tem­ber-Octo­ber 2021: Define Phase – define inno­va­tion chal­lenges for key lever­age points in the sys­tem and gen­er­ate ideas on how to address these, includ­ing a Sense-Mak­ing Work­shop and Ideation Work­shops.

Late 2021 – mid-2022: Devel­op Phase – launch of action­able pro­to­types for test­ing in diverse (the­mat­ic and/or region­al) teams

2022: Deliv­er Phase – Capac­i­ty of the Social Lab Mem­bers built to set up and sus­tain the spir­it of pro­to­typ­ing (test­ing and iter­at­ing), and glob­al progress shar­ing events with the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty

Ear­ly-2023: Process Com­ple­tion – pro­to­types eval­u­at­ed, and suc­cess­ful projects placed with hosts for long-term imple­men­ta­tion and scale-up.