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.

Sustainability comes from impact

The likelihood that CLG or others will “roll this out” is fairly small I think, from what heard, but worth hoping for…

However I think we need to think of sustainability from the levels of the interventions and impacts we are hoping to achieve:

• At the individual and community level- sustainability comes through increased social and cultural capital, especially when backed up by available, accessible and intuitive technologies…
• at the mentor level relates to enthusiasm generated to carry on, tools to network as a community of practice and get support, potentially ways to link in to current paid jobs or continue to be paid.
• at the organisational / network level/ training level: motivations to exist and sources of resourcing, inter networking abilities, use of technology to help people maintain relationships, publicly available, online tools, located with a or many sustainable organisations
• at the national level- champion(s) to fight the corner for mentors in Whitehall and seek future funding and tie to future opportunities, a lose alliance of key network organizations makes sense here?

Sustainability must take into account the many regional networks that exist, with current resources that can be built on, or that we shouldn’t lose. It should investigate the potential at the local authority level. It should embrace community development principles.

And I think sustainability should be linked intrinsically with scalability / breaking new ground.

We don’t want to look to create an “in crowd” of technically excited folks… though those types are very cool and helpful.. We need to also think about networks and places where this stuff is needed but may not exist, we might need to build some bridges to other communities where we may totally lack a presence… and where other networks might be inspired by our materials and give us a good spread for not much investment of energy.

Introducing Sustainability

We want to make sure that what is achieved is continued and (if possible) grown.  At least in the places touched by the demonstrators we need to make sure that the skills and enthusiasm for communicating using digital media remains. We will build sustainability in from the beginning.