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.

A proposal for research and mapping of demonstrators

I propose we use the research and mapping to find out both what people are doing and what they could be doing in addition… so the research and mapping questions will help to shape the final selection criteria.

I’m posting this here because people may not find the research and mapping work package very sexy…. yet it could play a key role in defining criteria and therefore its important we get it right!

Introducing Demonstrators

This is the exciting bit, as it’s where people in communities will be getting support and motivation to participate in community development and social media.  The digital mentor projects will be commissioned following the research and mapping phase.  We are aiming for a mix of both building on existing activities and putting in place some new projects.  It’s to be as open a process as possible and include a range of different types of organisations running projects.  Any work which can be done during the bidding process to identify existing exemplars will really help us to hit the ground running when the bid is won.