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Round ‘ere is a community-led research project building a wellbeing data hub in Widnes.

This is part of our larger participatory data stewardship work testing different ways of shifting power to communities on how their data is imagined, collected, and used.

We finished the first phase of the project in November 2023. Read about that work below. We’ll be launching the second phase of Round ‘Ere Widnes in Spring 2024.

Project Summary

The support we’re provided by the NHS, Councils and other community organisations is designed using information they hold about us. But are they using the right information to understand what we need?

How do they know we’re well?

Generally, it’s made up of things like: smoking rates, how physically fit people are, whether people are out of work due to illness. and even how long people live. Organisations around us collect all this information to guide how they invest in and design local services and support.

Now those factors that determine whether you’re ‘well’ come from experts who work in research, medicine, social sciences – people who’ve pulled together information over decades and decided ‘this is what it means to be well’. That feels a bit odd though, doesn’t it?

At the Civic Data Cooperative we want to make what you think about data matter, so we ran a test project to help direct how this data is used.

What we did

We recruited 15 community residents to talk to the people around them, helping us to find out what ‘feeling well’ means to Widnes. Let’s be clear from the outset, that question has no right or wrong answers – we wanted to know what makes people feel good and happy, what makes their lives feel like it’s going well.

We trained our community residents in how to do research including things like listening skills, research methods, and wellbeing concepts.

Over Summer 2023, our residents interviewed hundreds of friends, family, and community members on what makes them feel well. Next we looked at what we currently measure and compared it to what people said about wellbeing.

They found out lots of important things about the value of history, autonomy, family, and mental wellbeing to people in Widnes. Read about their findings below.

The next step is to build the digital platform that represents what Widnes residents think about wellbeing. That will be part of the Civic Data Cooperative’s Data Commons project.

In Summer 2024, we will work with residents to think about how we might start measuring on a local level. And how we can use this information to design support, products and services that impact the measures residents told us are important.