Next steps for the Voicebox partnership

Whilst we await a decision from CLG on our Expression of Interest, we thought it would be good to outline our thoughts on next steps for taking the Voicebox partnership forward (in hopeful anticipation that the EOI will get through…).

Thanks to those of you who have expressed an interest in being involved in the partnership, either through the Digital Mentor blog or by signing up to the Contribute section of this site. To save those of you who have already inputted via digitalmentor.org, we’ve automatically transferred your details across so that there’s a single list of potential partners.

As you may know, our original plan was to appoint workstream leads before the Expression of Interest was submitted on 24 November. However, we decided to delay a decision on this, as it became clear that we should focus on our approach first and getting that right before assigning roles. It also gives people who have come to this later in the day - particularly those who came to the CLG workshop on 19 November - an opportunity to get involved.

We’d really like to spend the next fortnight focusing on developing the ideas for the approach to the project - particularly the criteria for the Digital Mentors - before making decisions about funded roles within the partnership. We do appreciate this will leave some of you in a state of limbo but this feels like the right thing to do. We’ve acknowledged that the open innovation process isn’t easy, but are committed to seeing it through.

It would be really useful to have a face to face meeting bringing together all those with an interest in being part of the Voicebox partnership - please watch this space for further information.

In the meantime, we’d like to encourage you to contribute your thoughts and ideas as to how the project should develop, either under specific workstream headings or as part of the ‘Big picture’ section. You can either comment on what has already been posted, or write your own blog post. Just email admin@voice-box.org.uk to set this up.

If you haven’t already signed up as a potential partner, it’s not too late to do so - just click on Contribute and register your details. Thanks to everyone who is joining us in this endeavour - it is shaping up to being a really interesting journey for all of us!