Engagement Tools: MARVIN

One of the identified issues for collaborative water planning in Australia is improving the quality of community engagement, particularly in relation to the effective communication of the science that water plans are based upon.

In the National Water Commission's Waterlines Report on water allocation planning, the authors' identified some of the limitations of the current approach, which tends to rely heavily upon stakeholder advisory committees and calls for public submissions:

Community engagement needs to be designed for the purpose, context and stakeholder needs. Different purposes include building community capacity and understanding, identifying values and concerns, seeking local knowledge and ground-truthing data, helping to identify and assess options, resolving or reducing conflict, and building community trust and confidence in the plan. A wide range of tools can be used to achieve these ends, such as workshops, newsletters, focus groups, public submissions, public meetings, citizen juries, surveys and committees.

Building upon this wide range of potential engagement tools, the Water Planning Tools project has been exploring the use of MARVIN - an internationally awarded windows-based standalone presentation builder, authoring tool and training solution.

About Marvin

MARVIN was developed through an ongoing collaborative partnership between a computer software company called Inchain, the Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training and the Northern Territory Department of Health and Community Services. It was specifically created as a tool for communicating information to indigenous people in a way that made the communication relevant and acceptable. Due to the nature of the software, MARVIN can be used for any presentation, narration, story, information sharing, or training task. MARVIN produces multi-sensory presentations or stories that include recorded voice (in any dialect), synthetic voice, music, text, photographs and animated characters. See here for some examples of the types of presentations that can be produced with MARVIN.

It creates easily distributable self running presentations that do not require third party players installed on the audience’s computers. Users can re-use existing presentations, and tailor them for different audiences, sites or cultural groups, quickly and easily. The earliest uses of MARVIN by Health Workers from the Department of Health and Community Services focused on leveraging engaging computer characters to convey health messages within indigenous communities surrounding Alice Springs.

The use of interactive characters that were instantly identifiable representations of people capable of speaking local indigenous languages was effective for overcoming many cultural barriers, according to the designers. Being characters, they were able to broach topics that people can not and were used to communicate traditionally sensitive subjects such as substance abuse, sexual health and mental health with enormous success.

Using MARVIN as Community Engagement

The value of MARVIN as a communication tool in practice is derived more from the way in which presentations are produced. According to the designers, MARVIN has matured from a presentation tool into a communication methodology that couples authoring and community participation. Emphasis is placed on involving the community in the development of presentations. This occurs in a range of ways, such as the creation or collection of local images, voice recordings, character selection, story boarding or giving the presentation cultural meaning. Co-authorship provides community ownership of both the communication process and the message itself. The interactive and collaborative approach that MARVIN brings is as important, if not more so, than the message itself.

Find out more from the MARVIN website.