Good Luck Voicebox!

Just a quick note to say good luck to the Voicebox team. I’ve only the very loosest idea of how much work its taken both on and offline to pull everything together but no doubt its been considerable.

Hopefully this will pave the way for many more open collaborative approaches. What I really like about how this has come together is that it has a feel of ‘we’re in this together/we’ll be travelling together on a learning journey’, with pathways for those that start out as beneficiaries/participants able to become more fully involved in the programme - much more appropriate than ‘lets learn it from the experts’ (or ‘teach it to those that aren’t!’).

So good luck and fingers crossed…….

Video update & 6 things I have learned

David Wilcox posted this video interview with me to his blog - and kindly let us know that we could reproduce it here:

Six things I’ve learnt through developing the voicebox bid using an open innovation approach:

1. Partnership is a much better way to do things

I’ve learnt lots of things I didn’t know before, and I know that this group of organisations and people will deliver a better project than we would do it on our own.

2. It takes loads of time to develop ideas in this kind of forum

Involving lots of people takes lots of time. We have spent so much time coordinating comments, responding to people, checking (and double checking) comments and updates on the blog. Including lots of people leads to a better bid, but it also takes lots of time. AND, we could have spent lots more time doing this and that time would have been well spent - if we had it.

3. Social media helped me to put aside prejudices and listen to all comments with an open mind and a receptiveness to learn

Big organisations, little organisations, individuals, and VIPs all have something worthwhile to add. It’s great to be surprised by really insightful comments from people (and organisations) I had never heard of last October. Brilliant. Everybody has made good contributions. Active listening is easier to do using social media.

4. It’s really hard to balance open debate and to provide structure for a constructive discussion

The best debate is both open and led. I’m very experienced at chairing meetings, and always try to balance an open debate whilst guiding discussion to the purpose of the meeting, within a set timeframe. Wow, this is so hard on a blog. I just didn’t have the time to do this properly, even with the great effort and time put in by Anne and Ben too, we really found this hard. We wanted the discussion to be really open and free forming in the beginning and then tried to focus debate and ideas as time went on. We have definitely learnt lots and will do it better next time (if only a little bit).

5. Not everyone likes using social media to develop bids

Some people love this medium, some don’t. Some people find it hard to keep up as it takes time, and it takes a new kind of habit, fitting it into your day, grabbing ten minutes. I really like the cross over between twitter and the blogs, feeding interest. We may have lost people who don’t use blogs, but we did use a mix of media too - we used email to keep up with everyone too. And the phone! And had face to face meetings.

6. The journey’s been fun but arriving will be better

In our bid we did our best to explain this journey to our friends at the Department of Communities and Local Government. The delivery of the digital mentor programme (by voicebox) will be better than it would have been if done in a different way because we (the partners) have been on this journey together.  It is the collective wisdom of such a diverse and experienced group of people.  We have used the digital media to develop a bid about supporting people in deprived communities to use digital media. I’m sure the fun’s only just started.

Anne and Ben did most of the work at UK online centres end, so they may also comment here too!