http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7259416.stm

It involves charities using SMS, podcasts and the web

This is a new-ish departure and might be a good one for I-E to follow, as perhaps the target audience is excluded.

However, it also seems to play to what David Wilcox has been blogging about recently in the role of institutions like the BBC. As a public service broadcaster, perhaps in this new world, they have a service to play promoting content, ideas and sharing stories that enable scale.

See David’s post here

http://www.designingforcivilsociety.org/2008/02/bbc-plans-to-su.html

Perhaps the I-E and the BBC ought to be speaking to one another, and we could have a few TV programmes about the Third Sector ?? It would beat some of their other output…..

There are 3 things that enforced on me the decision not to ’scale’….

1. The sector – I organised a meeting of other relevant national orgs a few years ago to discuss a couple of ideas – one being passing on our learning & programme so that others could replicate it, and the second being the idea of developing a shared ‘accreditation’ or ’standard’ to recognise young peoples community contributions – the reaction shocked me. In the main all the people were interested in was promoting their own work – there was no effort made at finding shared ground so that we could develop something that could benefit young people & communities with the exception of two – one who was representing the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (except she was at that moment leaving so not much use!), and the Citizenship Foundation with who we’ve done lots of work since albeit none of it developmental
2. My own (previous organisation) – of which a Director made it very clear that their only interest was in developing work that had direct (monetary) benefits for them. To a degree I understand this but my feeling was always that if you develop something genuinely beneficial it will have knock on benefits anyway. She disagreed with this and the attitude was very much protectionist – which in part led to my ultimate decision to move on.

The third is slightly ironic – having moved on to be free to make the decisions about how we develop I now find we’re limited by capacity and by network! And having had the experience of number 1. I’m less enthusiastic about putting energy into building projects up beyond what we can manage ourselves.

Thats not to say I don’t want to – I very much want to but this leads me to a fourth reason which is how hard it is to find people that genuinely share the same vision. So many of the people responsible for running programmes are employed after a programme bid is submitted – so they don’t tend to share the same level of ownership and feelings that they are in control of what that programme is about. And at the other extreme people ‘at the top’ are often a bit too detached to want to talk about the level of practicalities that I like to!