What is relational technology?

I’ve been going on about relational services and technology for a while now. I wrote this essay last year, and this follow up blogpost.

Hopefully I’ll also be working with some partner organisations to do some further exploratory work in the future (hit me up if you want to discuss or have some funding for us!), but in the meantime I wanted to share a couple of examples of what, for me, constitutes relational technology.

Just as a quick recap, relational models of service delivery are those which centre people and their relationships, start from a place of trust and autonomy, and provide choice to the people using the service. In the public sector context this might mean people using social care, employment services or healthcare for example.

Not every aspect of the digital public sector needs to be relational: sometimes we just need a transaction to be quick, accurate and easy to access. But when we’re dealing with more complexity, something that affects a person’s whole life, or where the consequences of the tech going wrong are significant and far-reaching, a grounding in relational principles is a valuable starting point.

The first example, and perhaps the purest in terms of its applicability to other bits of the public sector, is Equal Care Coop. Based in Calderdale, it’s set up to give decision-making power to people who give and receive care and support. The technology they have designed centres human relationships, providing choice and building trust. It was also set up to be an alternative to commercial care and support technology providers, as Equal Care say on their website:

“Much of the tech on the market prioritises the manager's perspective and a surveillance, 'regulation-first' culture. The companies selling it are also mostly subject to the high-growth, fast-exit rules of venture capital culture.” 

Equal Care’s platform is cooperatively owned, and allows care-recipients and care-givers to come together in a Team. Team members might be paid care workers, friends or family; the supported person can choose. The platform enables the Team to join up the care they provide and respond directly to people’s needs, and means that supported people have far more consistency in care than they would normally receive. Care-givers also benefit from much better pay and conditions than typical for the sector.

Relationships, collaboration and choice are the core principles of Equal Care’s approach and their platform. People receiving support are in charge of their Team through the platform, giving them a far greater level of control and decision-making than they would otherwise have. Through the platform, the supported person can choose which people in their Team and wider circles of support can access different kinds of data and information, like their personal care records, finances, or weekly schedules.

Alongside this, the platform aims to cut down on form-filling and logistics for everyone involved in the care relationship: the goal of much public sector digitisation. The approach and platform are now also being trialled in Hackney in East London.

Knowle West Media Centre in South Bristol takes a relational approach to a broad range of technology initiatives and projects. The local community is key to everything KWMC does, and they use technology to build local wealth, community infrastructure, skills and capabilities. Among many other things, they have built a community makerspace, a local secure network, a local ‘internet of things’ network to allow local people to deploy sensors for things like air quality, and a platform for mutual aid and local volunteering. The technologies built and used by KWMC serve the needs of the community, rather than being imposed on them.

Free Ice Cream create technologies to enable public participation, alternative infrastructures and engagement in civil society and democracy. They make mapping tools to enable communities to create their own datasets, generating a digital map of a local community and all of the relationships within it. These maps can help identify shared interests to enable collaboration, where there are gaps in provision and where resources might be best deployed. The value generated by the relationship map is owned by the community, and everyone in a community can get involved in building and using the map. Community relationships are recognised as integral to how places work, and making change happen.

These examples, while different in their purposes and manifestations, all share a belief in the importance of relationships, whether these are one-to-one or within a community. They also deploy technologies in service of people and their needs, rather than deciding that a piece of tech is so exciting they just have to find a use for it (GenAI, I’m looking at you). They have lots to teach us about how tech can be driven by human needs, values and relationships, and where public services might adopt these same principles.