[Digital-Mentor] Digital mentors

[Dave Briggs]

Dear all

You have all either commented on my blog or emailed me about the
digital mentors role that was highlighted in CLG's White Paper
'Communities in Control' a little while back, or are just the sort of
people I reckon might be interested. Many thanks for all your
contributions, which as you know have been read by the department and
are helping to shape what they are doing.

I had the opportunity to meet with Georgia Klein, a contractor at CLG
who is designing the tender process for the pot of money which will be
used to fund the digital mentor pilot projects. How exactly this is
going to work is yet to be decided.

David Wilcox and I have been talking about an Open Innovation Exhange
[http://www.innovationexchange.net/] style approach to bid to run the
project, making the most of the many excellent projects already going
on, and building upon them to reach into new areas. When I discussed
this with Georgia, she was very positive about such a bid, which would
be in keeping with the way CLG see this role developing.

I have therefore put a bit of work in putting together an online
platform for those that want to get involved to share stories and
experience and work together on a bid as a collective for the tender.
You can find it at http://digitalmentor.org - which is a blog. There
is also a wiki at http://wiki.digitalmentor.org/ and a mailing list
http://digitalmentor.org/mailman/listinfo/list_digitalmentor.org

Anyone can contribute however they want to, and I have tried to keep
barriers to entry as low as possible. I would urge everyone to sign up
to the mailing list if you want to keep up-to-date with what people
are saying - you can choose to receive a digest of posts rather than
them all individually if you want to keep the noise down.

The wiki uses a rather low-tech platform, but it has the advantage of
being password accessible, rather than needing a user name etc as
well. I have started to create some pages and stuff on there, but if
anyone wants to pitch in I would very much appreciate it.

The blog seems a sensible place to highlight content on the other two
platforms but also as a way of telling stories about what we have done
already and gathering what works. If you would like a blog account,
just ask.

Please do get on board with this project, as I think most people agree
that there are some tremendous possibilities for the digital mentors
to encourage disadvantaged people to have a voice. An open,
collaborative, big-tent approach seems the most sensible way to
approach this.

Also please forward this email on to anybody you think might be
interested in getting involved, who I have missed out. Finally, rather
than reply to this message, try and join the mailing list and send it
to there, so it appears in the archives.

Cheers!

-- 
Dave Briggs
db at davepress.net |  http://davepress.net |  07525 209589 (Mobile)