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…….

Finding a Model

Forgive the supermodel pun

Over in the Summary of Discussions post Anne Faulkner has suggested a model which I’ve copied below. I’ve added a link to a diagram of my own thoughts for a possible model (which you can view here).

The subsequent discussions in the comments are going well and clearly other people have other ideas - the problem though is its quite difficult to get across thoughts replying in comments. I’ve listed below a few options for tools that could be used to demonstrate potential models visually:

• Mindmeister: Map out your model, collaborate with others and then share it on here
• or alternatively you could use Webspiration or Mindomo
• If you prefer to use desktop software try Mindnode (for mac) or Freemind (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• or you could just use post-it notes & paper, take a photo and upload it to Flickr and then share the link on here

Whatever method you use I think its good to see models in a visual way. Even if you don’t have your own suggested model you could download somebody elses, add comments & scribbles and upload your modified version.

For my own model it helped me think much better about who a Digital mentor actually is, how they would be recruited and what their pathway would be to become further involved. Other people may completely disagree with this though - maybe you regard the role of Digital Mentor as a professional Social Media expert, or perhaps you think they should be other types of practitioner. Possibly you work for an organisation that has already developed a model for mentoring, or you have a programme that is proven to motivate and inspire people to take action - if so how can these be adapted into a visual model that could be used for the Digital mentor programme?

The model I’ve used is based on programmes I used to work on that worked with people living in low income communities throughout the UK to help them organise their own projects and activities to improve local communities. How this was approached varied between programmes - some used professional trainers, others involved volunteers, some provided grant funding & some didn’t - so I’ve combined all of these into a model I think could work well for this programme.

Hopefully some of you have your own ideas - if so it would be good to see some examples and then maybe the best elements of the various models can be combined in to one that really will work for Digital Mentors.

Annes original proposed model is this:

Phase 1

1) Start with putting together a bank of trainers, with a combination of skills from the three areas above (one person is unlikely to have them all).
2) At the very start of the project, design a programme and hold a series of face-to-face training events at regional and sub-regional level, aiming to engage a wide range of community development practitioners (in the hundreds). These become your bank of Digital Mentors.
3) For a limited period, go with the ‘let a thousand flowers’ bloom philosophy, supported and encouraged by ongoing online and face-to-face resources. Encourage the Digital Mentors to be creative, challenging and consider the social change they want to achieve. My current thinking is that this would largely be unfunded but you would have a small capital/revenue pot to seed fund some projects which really needed it.
4) During this period, set up a Digital Showcase, which would provide a forum for 1) project beneficiaries, ie the communities themselves, to showcase their work and 2) for the projects to talk about the social change they want to achieve.
5) Organise a ‘people’s vote’ (a bit like the Big Lottery Fund’s People’s Millions) which would allow other practitioners and members of the public to vote for the project they think would benefit most from more resources to develop into a deeper, more impactful project.

Phase 2

6) On the basis of this vote, provide grants to a small number of projects (20-30) to develop their projects.
7) In the meantime, the existing Digital Mentors could continue to run their projects on an unfunded basis. Some of them may run aground, but others may bloom. The consortium should look for ways to leverage in other funding to support these projects and would continue to co-ordinate an online resource bank.
8 ) As part of the evaluation, CLG would have a control group (the unfunded Digital Mentors) to be able to see the impact of a funded vs unfunded model. In reality, many of the ‘unfunded’ projects may be funded through other sources, so this will need to be built into thinking about sustainability.

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!)