Collaborating on Digital Mentors with Voicebox

I am enjoying helping with the Voicebox bid for the CLG digital mentor project: those involved like Helen, Anne and Ben from UK online centres are so enthusiastic and eager for the open, collaborative approach they are taking to succeed.

Here’s a video of Helen Milner talking about the Voicebox bid:

As part of the tendering process, all interested parties had to submit an expression of their interest to CLG to advance to the next stage. Voicebox has done just that, and what’s more, they have posted the content of their EoI on their blog! Great work!

Also on the blog, Voicebox are keen for people to post their thoughts on digital mentoring, whether in their big picture thread, or by adding thoughts about any of the work packages that have been identified so far. This can be done by leaving comments on existing posts – which quite a few people have started to do already – or by contacting the team using admin@voice-box.org.uk to write a whole new post.

Here’s a second video, which features, from left to right, Paul Henderson of Ruralnet, me, and Nick Booth. We’re talking somewhat disruptively about whether digital mentors would be better off without CLGs money… it’s all David Wilcox‘s fault, who was encouraging us to be naughty.

Anyway, part of the reason I included this video is for the benefit of readers of this blog who haven’t met me yet and who assume I am significantly older than I am. It happens a lot.

It could be Rotterdam, or anywhere

Actually, no it couldn’t, because Rotterdam is a beautiful city, and I am having tremendous fun here with Nick Booth.


We are at an R4R event for residents groups throughout Europe, with two aims: to demonstrate the power of the social web, and to show just how easy it is to do.

We are armed with some basic kit: Flip Ultras and point and click cameras, as well as our mobile phones (don’t worry, in order to stave off bankruptcy for a little longer I’ve switched roaming off on my iPhone…). The point being that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tech to be able to publish content online.

We’re running a blog here, in order to demonstrate how easy it is, which has been populated with some of the other work Nick has done with R4R.

Nick and I actually got up at 5.30 am this morning, and we have since used four forms of transport: taxi, plane, train and finally water-taxi. Here’s a pretty rough video of us getting on the water-taxi, with Maurice Specht, who generously guided us around.

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