What is an Open Collaboration?

Firstly I’m not involved with the consortium bid - I’m just an interested observer. Originally I was interested in the idea of Digital Mentors because of a discussion I’d been involved in related to young people and digital exclusion. I’ve been running a programme for several years that relied on young people involved with us using the internet - partly because geographically they were spread out throughout the country and partly because we had a very small staff so it was more practical to ask everyone to come to us than for us to chase round everyone in the traditional phoning and writing approach. When we first started many of these young people didn’t have home internet access, many claimed not to have an email address - so we created one for them……. then we found out they did have a school email address they just weren’t aware that an email was an email! We also discovered that every school our young members attended did allow web access to the site we’d set up - so in fact access wasn’t the issue, digital literacy however was, and this came as quite a surprise given that I’d had the general assumption that everyone younger than me must be technically savvy.

Anyway that was my initial interest, I’ve since become more interested in a different aspect of this ‘open collaboration’ approach - and that’s the actual process of having an open collaboration.

I find the idea of developing and running a programme in the open very attractive for lots of reasons. There’s a sense of it being more ‘honest’, there’s the opportunity that even if you’re not directly involved you can contribute, there’s a degree of accountability with people allowed to freely add their views, and of course there’s the potential to bring on board a far wider range of expertise than you could with a  traditional closed collaboration.

Collaboration doesn’t just happen by itself though. Something we used to stress in training with youth forums is that to have an effective meeting you need to have somebody involved who’s aware of the process of having an effective meeting. I think the same applies to open collaboration - there has to be people aware of the process of having an effective collaboration.

For example when people become involved are they aware of how to contribute? Are they aware of what useful contributions are? Is there a process for sorting through messy discussions and extracting the good stuff so it doesn’t get lost? Is there a method for helping the people with the smallest voices still have their ideas given equal consideration? and how do you manage this - do you assume people should just get it, is somebody responsible for managing it or do you rely on the framework provided to create an environment that lends itself to the kind of collaboration you want?

A fundamental question is why do people contribute anyway - what is their interest or motive? When UK Online Centres stated their intent to lead a consortium the debate over on the digitalmentor.org changed very quickly from a ‘figuring it all out conversation‘ to a lot of hand waving “me too & sign me up”, “look what I can do” and so on. From the perspective of forming a consortium this was fantastic and the very impressive list of collaborators in the Expression of Interest document illustrates this. The question now though is how does this open collaboration get all that various expertise to start putting forward its views into the open and onto this very nice space that Dave Briggs has created for the development of the bid?

If this doesn’t happen I don’t see how this can be an open collaboration - an open invitation to become involved with a consortium perhaps, but not a true open collaboration with discussions happening in the open that can really shape how the programme will develop. I think in making the challenge for having those open discussions its important to consider not just who is involved now, but who may become involved in the future, and this should be very much in mind that the programme should strive to involve those who are currently to be beneficiaries to eventually become involved in developing the further development of the digital mentor programme. With this in mind its important to challenge the use of jargon and language that is exclusive. In traditional collaborations we can use jargon freely and just bring people up to speed when they look confused (although I think that’s bad practice too) - but online if we don’t explain what we mean so that anyone can understand it we risk excluding people - which given the aims of this programme would be ironic!

Well before this becomes far too long here’s a few thoughts….

• How much of a culture change is required to get people to truly collaborate in the open?
• Is it a culture change or just a process of education that’s needed?
• How much of what is learned in making the process of open collaboration inclusive can be fed into the main challenge of tackling digital exclusion?
• How do you foster one way conversations towards becoming a dialogue?

(feel free to rob those as future blog topics if you like!)