What is Takso?
- Productivity: It saves time on planning and reporting activities
- Learning: It enhances our knowledge as managers and producers
- Advocacy: It provides the evidence for further investment
- Innovation: It directs us towards new ways of thinking
- Evaluation: It records consistent data for outcomes analysis
- Bank of ideas: It is a database for every activity
- Empowering: Users manage their own planning, evaluation and learning
- Imagination: It uses machine reading (LLM) tools to create new ideas
- User friendly: It is on-line and uses intuitive human processes
Takso is co-developed with organisations, producers, communities and government agencies in Australia. As a SaaS platform (software as a service) it is accessible on any digital device, bringing consistent planning and evaluation frameworks to all organisations, large or small, and public policy or private enterprise.
Developed out of research and foundations in defining cultural impact, the underlying principles apply to all domains of economic, social, environment, culture, and governance.
Takso is currently in use by a small number of pilot sites in Australia and Europe that are assisting in its development as a radical change to how we plan, deliver, evaluate and report on our activities.
New partners and pilot sites can join this growing development. If this is right for yourself or your organisation, please email us to find out more information and the timing of the roll-out.
Takso makes the complexity of planning & evaluation simple.
Takso is the flight data recorder for all our activities. It has been developed over many years of practice and research by the Cultural Development Network in conjunction with Australian governments, funding bodies, and independent producers.
Looking for economic outcomes, social outcomes, environmental outcomes or better governance? If delivering activities is the means, then the causal path to those outcomes starts with measuring the impact of your activities.
Takso responds to the problem of a lack of consistent narratives and understanding of the outcomes. Measurement alone does not provide the understanding we are seeking if it is not considered within the whole narrative. This requires a consideration of the planning intent and the evidence leading to the choice of activities underpinning an expected result. Only with this can measurement help us understand what is achieved for participants and how efficiently the inputs have been applied to the outputs to tell if and why outcomes have been achieved.
Takso records the whole narrative of an activity, as it happens, no longer requiring retrospective collection of data.
It ensures that all activities have intended outcomes that address the strategic goal of the organisation and that producers and managers can access and develop their own analysis based on what they have recorded in Takso. All activities that have intended outcomes can be recorded in Takso and reported individually or as an aggregate with other like activities.
The Takso platform is underpinned by three key research outputs:
- CDN’s Six principles for Planning: Based on values, directed towards goals, focussed on outcomes, informed by evidence, underpinned by a theory of change and respondent to evaluation.
- CDN’s Schema of Measurable Cultural Outcomes Adding new outcome measures of creativity, enrichment, insight, diversity and heritage, providing a ‘cultural’ perspective to outcomes.
- CDN’s Schema of Inputs and Outputs. Developed with the diverse ‘laboratory’ of the Australian local government sector, this schema provides context to the evaluation of outcomes.
This research is embedded into Takso through a researched and field-validated activity workflow that reflects what policy and program managers have told us they already do implicitly. Making this process explicit enables data collected in Takso to inform future practice and is aggregable for reporting and benchmarking over the long term. Takso data can provide a national or regional picture of inputs, outputs and outcomes of every type of activity. When combined in a consistently structured database, the new forms of machine reading can uncover insights in a fraction of the time it would take human research over decades.
Takso’s intuitive human-based activity workflow:
- is focussed on identifying and measuring the impact of activities across the five public policy domains of cultural, social, economic, environmental and governance.
- collects and builds a library of evidence-based activities and research to support a theory of change approach to delivering an activity that will directly address the identified goal of the organisation.
- provides users with an initial set of 28 accessible and consistent evaluation methods, that go beyond the usual emailed questionnaire.
- aggregates data from across the system or within any program or organisation to provide consistent monitoring and governance, and
- can communicate with other corporate systems i.e. project and financial management.
Background
The Takso platform is a public sector funded initiative led by CDN in partnership with creators, producers, regional & urban councils and national and regional cultural agencies joining in trials to make Takso applicable to a diverse public and private sector. The product’s potential has received an enthusiastic response from Australian councils, trial sites and international agencies and has been endorsed by the international local government peak body UCLG (United Cities and Local Government.)
Since 2016, the planning and evaluation frameworks developed by CDN have been presented via a series of workshops for local and regional governments across the Asia Pacific and Europe, further validating the theory and application in any setting.
Takso is in further development and accepting new users to build on the development for what is a platform built with the clients and users, to deliver benefit to all. CDN is a not-for-profit charity, whose goal is a vibrant and rich Australian culture. Takso brings together our practice and research to address that goal and includes values and culture in understanding all human endeavour.
For more information about Takso please email: contact@culturaldevelopment.net.au