Voicebox bid feedback from CLG

In the spirit of the open way in which we developed the Voicebox bid for Digital Mentors, I wanted to share with you the feedback we’ve had from CLG. There’s a lot in here which is positive and also some lessons which we need to learn. Overall, it seems that the Media Trust’s bid met more of the criteria for what CLG were looking for from the Digital Mentors project, so it must have been a great bid. We’re really looking forward to finding out more about Media Trust’s plans.

Download the PDF of CLG’s feedback on the Voicebox bid.

As I’ve said before, even though we’re very disappointed with the outcome, the process of developing the bid has to go down as our most successful failure of the last year. Open collaboration has now become an approach we’re embedding within our organisational culture.

We’re currently looking at how we can encourage decision-makers to move towards more open policymaking and support practitioners to share ideas and good practice via a Digital Engagement blog. Please come and take part at www.digitalengagement.org. In the coming weeks and months, we aim to use the site to develop a bottom-up Digital Manifesto which can be used by partners and presented to government to inform policymakers. We’re in the very early stages of this, so please let us have your feedback about ideas for shaping the blog.

Thanks again for all your support for the Digital Mentors bid and I’m sorry we’ve not been successful.

A new conversation

Helen has launched a new community blogging project over at digtialengagement.org which aims to be:

a collaborative space for all those interested in digital engagement to share ideas and agree priorities for action around digital engagement

This is of a much wider scope than digital mentors, and has the potential to be a real hotbed of interesting and vital debate. Helen writes:

By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.

I’ve helped out by setting the blog up, and will be adding my thoughts on digital engagement in due course. The aim is for the site to be as inclusive as possible, so see how you can get involved.

We are going to have some interesting announcements coming up, including how we are going to try and get this conversation going en masse at the Digtial Inclusion Conference in April.

Thankyou to all Voicebox contributors

I’m sorry to tell you that Voicebox was not successful in its bid to run the Digital Mentors initiative from CLG.  The call came in this afternoon, and to be honest, I’m still reeling from the disappointment.

The successful bidder was Media Trust, and so I’d like to congratulate their team who also worked really hard to develop the winning bid.

As you’ve read from the Voicebox blog so far, we’ve come such a long way since last autumn in terms of the understanding how an open and collaborative approach to developing bids can work, and so this wont be the last time we will use this approach to develop other opportunities that come our way!

A big ‘THANK YOU’ to all of you that contributed to the Voicebox blog. I’ve learned a great deal from you all and hopefully, some great contacts too.  I’m sure these links wont be lost!

In the meantime, I hope you will join with me in offering your support to Media Trust (and their partners) to ensure the Digital Mentors initiative help peoples in deprived communities in England develop skills in using social and community media.

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!

Latest bid summary

Following lots of calls and meetings with a range of organisations that have been supportive of the Voicebox bid, we thought it would be a good idea to publish a short summary of how the bid is shaping up. Although it’s getting close to the deadline now, we’re still keen to gauge your thoughts on it, so please do comment on the blog.

Voicebox Summary

At the heart of the bid is the Delivery Model, which is a high-level description of the approach we will describe to CLG using the diagram shown here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33342139@N08/3215275038/

The Model shows the following key areas of work within the project:

Research and Mapping (R&M) – This will start with a short and intensive (3 month) activity designed to collate existing expertise in the mentoring of social and community media skills to local communities. The knowledge gathered will start the population of a matrix of practice, as well as to identify gaps in provision. Information gathered at this early stage will inform our decisions on the types of demonstrator projects we would like to commission and of these, which we should fund. After three months the R&M work stream will remain active throughout the life of the project by gathering feedback from the demonstrator projects, which in turn will refine the matrix and re -evaluate the gaps.

Recruitment and Training of Mentors – Throughout the life of the project we will deliver a variety of training and mentoring interventions with the purpose of recruiting existing mentors into the project, and developing others to become so. A significant proportion of the effort will be spent in the first three to six months to ensure that trained mentors are able to engage with their communities, allowing the community projects they nurture to develop as long as possible across the two-year life of the Digital Mentors project. The method of training will vary; a mixture of face to face training ‘coming together’ events and online resources and mentoring delivered through a ‘bank’ of trainers.

Incubator projects – From month three onwards, we’ll start to incubate a range of projects using a variety of media, across a wide spectrum of target areas. Throughout the incubation period, we’ll keep a close eye on them and will look for lessons which can be fed in the R&M work stream. A small capital budget will be available to help remove barriers to engagement, though most incubator projects will be unfunded in the first year. A small number of projects will receive some funding following the research and training phase in order to stimulate activity which would otherwise not take place.  All incubators will be encouraged to make use of the bank of online resources that are aggregated and developed during the project, and contribute through peer-to-peer sharing.

Pathfinder projects -  At the end of year one, we’ll compare the outcomes of the R&M  analysis with the demonstrators emerging from the incubator projects and make informed decisions on which of these projects should be offered funding to develop their ideas more fully. Again, we want to have a wide variety of projects represented covering a range of target groups, communities of interest and geographies. We anticipate testing different levels of funding so that we can report back to CLG the projected levels of funding that would be required to deliver a national rollout. All pathfinder projects will be monitored closely and lessons fed back through the project management and R&M work stream.

Progression – We’ll provide opportunities for digital mentors and mentees (such as routes for accreditation) as well as to provide pathways to employment within the creative industries. These opportunities will be made available to both digital mentors and the community groups to whom they serve.

Strategic Leadership – The project will be effectively governed by a Project Board, and advised by a Strategy Group with representation from a wide selection of organisations with interest in digital mentoring, volunteering, the third sector and the public sector. We will develop a web platform which will be a hub for resources, information sharing and debate and a focus for the new partnerships which we will anticipate will develop through the project.

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.

Creating social learning spaces

One of the issues with the training element of the digital mentor initiative is that, of course, different people like to learn in different ways - and this will be amplified by the widely differing ability levels that already exist out there when it comes to online media.

What’s required, then, is perhaps a new way of looking at how we learn best and how that might be delivered. David Wilcox has a fascinating post about ’social learning spaces’. Such a social learning space could be anything or anywhere that learning is possible: a workshop, a conversation, a blog or a wiki, or a forum. Offline or online, it doesn’t matter - the important thing is that people are open and share their knowledge to add to the sum of learning available.

I guess Wikipedia is a good example of an online learning space, but any blog is the same: people sharing what they know online so others can benefit. But I think it is important for online social learning spaces to be blended with offline to create a more rich exchange of information and increased trust in the community.

I wonder how the idea of social learning spaces could be incorporated both into the training of digital mentors, the training that the digital mentors will perhaps themselves provide, and also how it can be encouraged in the work of the communities benefitting from digital mentoring?

Timetable and process for development of the Digital Mentors bid

As you’re aware, CLG has now sent us the Digital Mentors ITT, a copy of which is available to view here. You’ll note that the closing date for applications has been put back slightly to 5pm on Wednesday 4 February.

I would recommend reading the ITT as it provides valuable information about what the Digital Mentors programme should deliver, which may (subject to your feedback) affect the current thinking on how our bid should be built.

In terms of ‘the process’ moving forward, I propose:

• By Tuesday 6 January - to have received all your feedback on a preferred delivery model via the Voicebox blog. Please refer here for a couple of suggestions which have already been put forward by Anne Faulkner and Mike Amos-Simpson (thanks both!). NOW is your chance to critique these against the backdrop of what CLG wish to have delivered, or to propose new ones. Please add to the existing thread (link shown above) with any edits or new models you would like to have considered for the Voicebox bid.
• By Tuesday 6 January - for UK online centres to have received a clear indication from any organisation interested in a funded role to lead a workstream. Please note we are NOT seeking to identify ‘demonstrator projects’ or ‘trainers’ at this stage. We’ve reviewed the original list of workstreams against what we know now. We believe there are four key workstreams to deliver this work, as follows:
  • Project Management of the programme (which includes within its remit ‘sustainability’ plus the project management of the ‘demonstrator projects’. This workstream will be delivered by UK online centres.
  • Research and Mapping
  • External communications
  • Training and toolkits

We anticipate that there will be other funded roles supporting some of these workstreams, which will be considered after the workstream leads have been established.

Any organisations wishing to lead on one of the three remaining workstreams should email me (bbrown@ufi.com) no later than 5pm on Monday 5 January clearly identifying your workstream of choice. Shortly after, I will publish the names of the organisations that have contacted me on the Voicebox blog.

• On Thursday 15 January - The potential workstream leads will be invited to meet in London for a strategy session. The aim of the meeting will be to:
  • Run through the delivery model, and sign it off
  • Agree the role and responsibility of each workstream
  • Agree the key tasks required by each workstream

We expect the session to cover a lot of ground; therefore please expect to be involved for the whole day. During the meeting, we’ll announce the process for the appointment of the workstream leads itself.

• By noon on Tuesday 20 January - this will be the deadline for the submission of a short application form for workstream lead candidates.
• By close of business Wednesday 21 January - The UK online centres bid writing team will make the final decision on who will lead each of the work streams.
• On Friday 23 January - meeting of all collaborators in the Voicebox bid in London to clarify ideas about the Digital Mentors approach
• Wednesday 4 February - Deadline for response to the ITT

Final Digital Mentor specification issued

The next stage of the digital mentors process is now underway, with the specification for the tender now sent out to the 5 consortia bidding for the fund.

You can download a PDF of the document here.

We hope that all Voiceboxers will take a good look at the document and see how they could contribute, both in terms of ideas and also where they could take a lead in developing that part of the bid and being an integral part of the consortium delivering it.

Please do leave your comments in this post - or write a blog post of your own. If you haven’t got an account to do this, all you need to do is email admin@voice-box.org.uk to get one.

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