Country: United Kingdom (UNK)
Community OR and social intervention
The number of projects initiated to improve people's life runs in the millions nowadays - because of a growing awareness of why they are needed and of an expanding toolbox. They include projects to organise community agents, support alleviating social ills, help groups in developing countries and create the social conditions for effective medical help - and many others.
The principles that drive these projects include giving a voice to people (e.g. minorities), helping them to serve as community actors (e.g. the disabled), regenerating cognitive skills (e.g. in Alzheimer patients), developing well-run communities (e.g. in adverse conditions, including participating in competitions) or supporting social activities (e.g. save the church). The main aim is to help communities help themselves and their members create high quality lives - even when objectives, histories or access to resources is not or only partly shared.
The projects involved may be and have been studied from many angles, e.g. the process of value creation, the empowerment of individuals, the cost of their maintenance and the effectiveness of devolvement of governing power.
Community Operational Research (COR) attempts to study community development projects in terms of the operations involved (as part of OR) and of the principles of optimisation that can be applied in environments in which achieving multiple objectives needs to be coordinated.
A major (but not the only) aim is to perform such study while contributing to the development of the projects. This implies the use of special forms of modelling (the use of models given their previous use) and of measuring the effects of their implementation and of how they are maintained.
Contributions to this stream are invited that exemplify relevant studies, compare principles and/or construct coherent concepts to improve on the principles - including the process of identifying objectives.
Examples:
- service user led design and delivery of services
- social enterprise
- community involvement/engagement projects
- citizenship action learning
- community development
- impact evaluation of public programs
- linguistic coordination systems
- services for/of special groups such as older persons
- adaptations of principles used
- elicitation and engagement