Supporting self-organised community research through informal learning

The processes by which community-members help to shape local agendas can vary from highly-formalised procedures to very informal learning and sharing activities that engage multiple stakeholders in conversations to construct a better understanding of issues and concerns of community members. Community partners sometimes want to work with universities to build university-community research partnerships to support these activities. This paper looks at two such cases and the framework of ideas that we have used to steer and theorise our participatory research approach. This approach uses informal learning combined with a belief in the value and potential of self-organising processes in community research. The result is a contribution to Community OR that develops long-term engagements rather than brief interventions and produces ongoing constructed conversations with community members to help articulate and share knowledge about social experiences and expectations. The paper emphasises the need for Community OR researchers to focus not only on the technologies they are producing but also on the processes they create to support the development of the communities they are working with. We present a framework that uses a combination of self-organisation and informal learning theories to support the analysis and development of this process approach.