Some thoughts on delivery models

Over the holiday I spent some time catching up on all the posts and comments, trying to get my thoughts together in light of the new details arising from the ITT document. In responding to Anne’s post I broadly agree with the threads that seem to be coming together under the questions posed, with the following to add:

What are we trying to achieve?

I think what’s missing here is firstly the emphasis on sustainability and scalability. The longer term aim of this project is to establish what can be done to support the mentoring schemes that already exist to deliver more, and to identify where there are gaps that need plugging. The persistent impact of this project will not be those helped during its two years or the modest amount of money injected, but will be from how the learning, best practice, and innovation has helped advance digital mentoring as a concept beyond the projects endpoint.

The second point is one of innovation, emphasised by the ITT in its focus on ‘test[ing] a broad range of approaches’ (point 10). There is a need to demonstrate that the evaluation is not of a single way of doing mentoring, but of numerous, innovative approaches which will establish what works, what the support needs are for different models and how viral/replicable models are, hopefully leading us to some answers to the sustainability/scalability question.

The model proposed, to paraphrase, trains a bank of mentors and then lets them loose so they may use that knowledge in innovative ways to support local projects - ‘a thousand flowers bloom’. This should be a good way to foster some interesting innovation, but it does not address the issue of innovation in the types of initiatives which deliver digital mentors, only in the work of the mentors themselves.

I think this is one of the central points which is clearer now that the ITT is out. The consortia will support ‘existing digital mentor initiatives’ or ’set up and administer… new digital mentor programmes’. The project’s focus is on supporting mentoring initiatives, not on supporting initiatives which need a mentor. Point 6 of the ITT highlights that the demonstrator projects will ‘use a range of sustainable approaches to mentoring‘.

What we have to demonstrate at the end of the two years is not successful community projects which use social and community media, but successful mentoring projects which will support this as an outcome.

Who should digital mentors support?

The most exciting phrase for me in the ITT is ‘how social and community media tools can help tell the stories’ (point 19). I think we all understand that the ambition here is greater than IT training, for which there is no lack of great projects out there to deliver. There is no argument that basic IT skills are a barrier and prerequisite for the most deprived, but I feel the focus here is one step beyond this to explore the potential for the mentoring of social and community media to deliver change. For this reason I believe we should be steering away from creating mentors who fall into the category of IT training for the digitally excluded, and focus on mentors who can deliver at at the higher level of tools and content creation. This seems to be born out by the focus of the ‘delivering training’ section of point 19.

However, to some extent the final audience will be out of our hands. The beneficiaries of the mentoring will be the audiences of the existing initiatives that we support. For this reason I think it’s not something we should get too hung up about, but will be emergent from the results of the mapping exercise. Our role will be to look at the gaps left which need plugging by our own initiatives.

What organisational/infrastructure changes need to take place to effect this change?

I really like the four communities model that Anne identifies, and agree that community practitioners are definitely part of the model. These guys are the end-users; the recipients of the mentoring. We need to understand them to understand mentoring models which are worth testing. I also agree strongly with Gail’s point that we need a multi-level focus; national, regional, local and maybe even neighborhood. The mapping exercise needs to identify mentoring initiatives that work at different scales as I would expect there to be significant best practice which is not disseminated across these scales (case in point national and local government).

All digital mentors are not equal, and we need to understand the needs of mentors working at different scales and the support structures they need. In some senses we need to support a network of networks, and understand the return on investment and sustainability of each scale’s approach to identify where attention is best focused beyond the end of the project.

I keep coming back to tangible deliverables, and I’m pleased to see the focus on re-usable (creative commons) tools, best practice, techniques, and materials as an output of the project (point 43). The project can deliver significant achievements through just providing good dissemination of these outputs and providing a support network which bridges mentors and allows them to communicate and learn from each other. I firmly believe that a key success factor will be whether we can provide good mentoring of the mentors and provide them with a solid network for peer support and learning which can be sustained beyond the project (ref point 7). We should be eating our own dog food here and using social media tools to deliver this and I think there will be a role for some centrally provided infrastructure to support mentors as is hinted in point 29.

A new type of relationship

Great discussion here which I will only pick up a couple of points from… I think the idea that mentees will become mentors will be difficult to achieve in practice, as the mentees will be the community practitioners who are not necessarily able to commit to mentoring beyond their projects. It also doesn’t necessarily help with the viral spread of mentoring. It is most important that this happens geographically so that blanket coverage isn’t needed, mentors and mentees will tend to be co-located providing us with hot spots of good practice but not necessarily the spread we desire.

I would also hark back to my previous point in the structure of the project, and suggest that there isn’t one type of mentor we support, but a number of groups; possibly supported, un-supported, and intensive/directly employed. I support the idea that the best learning will come from having an approach which touches many mentors lightly through the provision of networks and toolsets, a number who get more help through the support of existing mentoring initiatives, and a small group who are intensively supported through funded ‘gap’ projects or direct intervention from our crack team of roving professionals.

Is competition healthy?

My final point, as this post is getting very long, picks up the discussion around the idea of some kind of competition/vote to secure resources. I’m not really keen on this, especially having gone through a similar experience with the Innovation Exchange where significant time and effort was spent by many to try and secure relatively small amounts of funding. My thoughts would be:

• The perception of the project could be skewed towards the fact that there’s money at the end. People forget the other stuff and just see it as a fund to fight for. In psychological terms it’s an extrinsic motivator that overcomes the intrinsic motivators, compounded by the fact that the resources up for grabs will not be substantial. In my opinion this impacted the networking outcomes of the Innovation Exchange as the focus was elsewhere.
• Do we want up to 7,000 orgs wasting their precious time and resources trying to win?
• If we have a public vote will the audience vote on the right thing - the most deserving mentoring projects, or the most deserving projects?
• In the end CLG will have the say on the existing initiatives supported (point 17) so will this even be possible?

I realise as I end this post that I haven’t proposed any alternative models in a constructive way as Mike has, however my feeling is that Anne’s summary is pretty much around the right lines and I’m seeking to stimulate discussion around the detail, rather than propose a fundamentally different approach.

Thanks for reading this far.