Doing it different with an open source bid to Government

As I mentioned recently, the Cabinet Office wants to promote innovation among UK nonprofits, and is offering £1.2 million to anyone who can come up with a plan for a Third Sector Innovation Exchange - and also put it into practice over three years.
My initial reaction was slightly sceptical, because despite brilliant work being done by extraordinary people there are many barriers to innovation in the sector, and even more to sharing. Why give away your best ideas when competing for funding? Why try and do things differently if that would mean getting rid of most of your trustees first? As a fall back, there's the fatal "We have always done it that way."
Then I got a few calls from people who were thinking of putting in a bid, and we fell to wondering whether it might be done differently. If one of the things that stifles innovation is the way that procurement of services is handled, couldn't we demonstrate a different approach while still meeting all the tendering requirements?
The difficulty in tendering for complex and challenging projects is that you know your proposals may well turn out to be inadequate because there's no way of figuring out in advance  what will work. Ideally the solutions have to be worked out with those who are "the problem". But if you do go in with a proposal full of co-creation workshops with stakeholders, there's a danger you will be seen as fuzzy. It's all too easy to end up either in tacit collusion between consultants and funders to do something rather inadequate, or acrimonious disputes about failure to "deliver".
One of the main aims of the Innovation Exchange is help improve the ability of third sector organisations to deliver public services. These days there's a lot of emphasis on the need to make this a collaborative process, as set out by Demos in its recent publication The Collaborative State. A few years ago they did an excellent publication Wideopen on open thinking, drawing on the inspiration of collaborative open source software development. The book Wikinomics argues the case for collaboration in what have been  commercially competitive situations. So why not invite people to develop a collaborative bid - and also commit to collaborating afterwards? Ah, said my friend Drew Mackie, when I relayed my conversations with others, "what we need is an open source bid".
Nice soundbite, but would it work in practice? I checked in again with my friends Simon and Jane Berry, who manage to be innovative, creative and very effective in delivery through Ruralnet UK and their associated trading company RNUK Ltd. The team there have a great track record of running learning and mentoring programmes. Could we do it open source? Yes, said Simon. In Bristol, Ben Whitnall and Andy Parkhouse at Delib, together with Steve Bridger and Ed Mitchell, had come up with their own ideas about mixing innovation online and off. My son Dan put together a Drupal-based site, where we could invite contributions and comments. You can see the result at the Open Innovation Exchange. Do join in there, and if you blog anything about it elsewhere, please use the tag openinex. There's a feed to the site.
It may fall flat. It may get a lot of interest and ideas ... but at least we are trying something different. Isn't that what innovation is about?

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, nonprofit, openinex

Comments

[Michele Martin]

David, this is a fabulous idea and I commend all of you for being willing to take the risk and do something differently. I blogged about it and I'm heading over to the site now to register. I'll be excited to see where this all lands.

[Ed Downs]

I too am cynical but ... I will post here an idea I have been harping on about for some time, who knows ...
I think that voluntary and community groups could benefit enormously from a solid accounting system that reflected their project based business model (notably multiple funding and reporting streams). Ideally this would take an existing open source package and enhance it, although well respected OS Accounts packages are not too common!
I'd like to see further extensions to include proper accounting for "in-kind" resources, having financial profiles (standard reports / open standards / meta data / passporting) defined to ease funding applications and similarly standard project accounting reports for funding bodies - all agreed with the major funders.
I know others are interested in this but it may not be innovative enough - no high technology, but it would make a difference!
Thanks for setting this up David.

[Matthew Edmondson]

I agree.

There was a project at BVSC and MOST that allowed projects to account for funding via various streams.

There is payroll software just released. Its statistics are the most respectable! http://www.paythyme.com/

Your suggestions for Open Standards in funding are excellent. Indeed this is a general area that is being debated at the moment.

[Leon Benjamin]

David,

This is new. This is different - for the UK! I'd love to make a contribution. In the meantime, you should;

1. Take a look at the work of Andrius Kulikauskas for inspiration. IMHO the world expert on "thinking openly" and "working openly". Minciu Sodas Lab.

2. Look through Michel Bauwens work at P2P Foundation - again, another (largely unrecognised) world expert on p2p production.

More soon.

[Toby Beresford]

David, Simon et al.

You may like to take advantage of hubtag (free) which allows people to create multi-stakeholder multi-platform content feeds - ideal for consultations, idea brain storming where you have lots of different organisations all using different technical platforms. Perfect for government apps.

All you need to do is choose a tag like openinex (as you have done) and market it to everyone then the hubtag feed brings stuff together whether it be youtube, photos or blog:

Try:
www.hubtag.com/openinex.rss (view as rss)
www.hubtag.com/openinex.view (view as html)
www.hubtag.com/openinex.m (view via mobile phone)
www.hubtag.com/openinex to get tips for promoting and using your tag.

Good luck with the bid.

Toby Beresford
HubTag and MicroAid Projects

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Leon, Thank you for your thoughtful mention! You are one of the very few business leaders with insight on how to bridge our worlds. Franz Nahrada of our Global Villages working group http://www.globalvillages.info is also a great fan of Michel Bauwens and has linked us up. David, perhaps we might connect? I love that you have posted your proposal: http://www.innovationexchange.net/final_version I'm currently working on a proposal to create software infrastructure to include those with marginal Internet access so they might better participate. We're having a chat on August 9th, 2007, 2:30 pm London time. http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Offline