[Self-reflection] Engagement workshop at Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, September, 2024

14 Sep 2024

Funded by IPUR-NUS, an engagement workshop was delivered on 3-6 September 2024 in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, by Univ. College London, National Univ. of Singapore, Xavier Univ., and Univ. of Glasgow.

Engagement workshops have gained increasing intrests as a way to turn research works into impacts. I have also been interested in this relatively new area, but it was still mysterious for me what impacts they could create. Organising the workshop was going out of my comfort zone, but as I had believed, it was an invaluable learning experience.

This article summarises the workshop programme and learning points.

Conclusion

An engagement workshop is helpful in:

understanding local context and needs to plan long-term projects;
building trust with local stakeholders for long-term collaboration; and
demonstrate recently developed tools to potential users.

Particular efforts are required on:

who to invite;
multiple schemes to naturally draw local context and insights; and
customisation of materials to local context.

Overview

The workshop was planned as in the figure below. It aimed delivering affordable and accessible hazard risk tools, focusing on the context of developing countries. The programme consisted of lectures, tutorials and field surveys, and discussion.

Cagayan de Oro, where the workshop happened, has very high risks of flooding and earthquake. The participants were engineer officials of the city, who work for Civil Defense, Science and Technology, Education, Urban Development, etc. The training programme has around 20 participants, while the last-day forum invited a larger size of audience including Heads of Departments and students of Xavier University.

Lessons we learned

Conversations with community members make it much easier to understand local context.

Risk awareness and perception: Cagayan de Oro seemed to still have vivid memories of the two devastating storms “Sendong” (2011) and “Pablo” (2012). The city also had a learning experience that the casualties were much less in the second storm despite the similar intensity, which seemed to have provided them confidence in risk management efforts. From a conversation I had, it seemed Cagayan de Oro’s housing market is one of the few markets that reflect hazard (flooding) risks in property prices, especially after 2011.
The community’s memory on earthquake seemed to be lesser owing to the lack of recent major earthquakes. Still, because of the risk management experience with flooding, the community had a good understanding of hazard risks and showed willingness to learn new technology.

Local needs: From several discussion sessions, we gathered narratives on the city’s pain points. A few examples are a lack of expertise inside local institutions and a lack of risk exposure maps (while there are hazard risk maps).

User experience of technical tools: After delivering the tutorial and the field works, we could gather the reviews from the participants. Overall, the feedbacks were highly positive. Meanwhile, some reviews were greatly helpful for improving accessability of the tools. For instance, after the inspection work of school buildings, the dominant comments were on the jargons used in the survey form. Many officials raised that some words would be difficult for local engineers; this is because of the very high diversity in local languages and the difference in English expressions in the Philippines and the UK (where the form had been developed), all specific to the Filipino context.

Hands-on activities can build the local stakeholders’ confidence in new tools.

The hands-on activities involved new, technically intensive tools, i.e. Python codes for system risk assessment, structural survey of buildings, and sensor measurements of slopes. We were worried if the participants would lose interests, but actually they seemed to have found them intriguing because they were challenging. In addition, the activities brought in several follow-on chats on how they could be deployed for their local decision systems. In other words, engagement workshops are a great chance for demonstrating our research products to customers.

Long-term activities are essential to create high impacts.

While we took away the two learning points above, the workshop was not enough to test risk tools in fields. Actual deployment of the risk tools we delivered will need several iterations and further developments between local officials (users) and us (developers). The deployments need to be monitored and calibrated in a long term. Communicating the deployment results with policy-makers and the public will need dynamic trials-and-errors.

What made the workshop successful

Invitation of participants with high relevance

Big thanks to the Social Development Office of Xavier University, Prof. Dexter Lo and his colleagues invited local engineer officials whose works are highly relevant to the programme scope. Enthusiatic participation motivated by high relevance was the primary driver of the workshop. This was possible only because some organising members were local experts.

Icebreaker

The workshop started with a human bingo, making participants talk to each other. It was highly effective in creating a team spirit. I think it could have been even better if the activity had had them learn each other’s name and specialisation.

A long-enough duration of the workshop (4 days)

The workshop ran for 4 entire days. It was demanding but provided us with enough time to have several discussion sessions. The more conversations we had, the more contextualised understandings we could form. I do not think such level of understanding could have formed by a one-off discussion.

Workshop materials customised to local examples

We designed the examples by school buildings, bridges, and slopes in Cagayan de Oro. It helped participants relate to presented tools and results.

What could have been improved

Discussion sessions with organisers as participants

We arranged a discussion session on risk communication. We planned it to be led by participants because we thought they, who as civil servants need to constantly communicate with policy-makers and the public, were better experts than us. We prepared a few slides introducing recent studies on risk communication; then we proposed several discussion topics as convenors.
While we could hear their insightful experiences and opinions, it was clear that they wanted to hear from us what was happening outside the Philippines and in academia. If I can have another chance, I will involve ourselves (the organisers) as participants of the discussion rather than simply as convenors.

DUCO