As you can see here, Simon Berry delivered our open source bid for the £1.2 million Innovation Exchange to Cabinet Office today. After a few weeks of mostly virtual work it seemed appropriate to drop some in hard copies as well as send pdfs to John Craig and colleagues, so Simon took the bike and train from Warwickshire, my son Dan and I turned up to provide some support and shoot a video. We'll have that edited soon.
To recap, a few weeks back a group of us decided to form a consortium to bid for the Third Sector Innovation Exchange contract, let by Government, and aimed to improve ways nonprofits deliver public services. We believe a lot of innovation comes from open collaboration (as do the authors of Wikinomics) ... so why not write the proposal in public, and ask anyone interested to join in? Dan set up the Open Innovation Exchange on a Drupal site, and we opened up not knowing quite what would happen. As one of the other consortium members, Ed Mitchell, writes, thankfully it went well:
This was just too good an idea to resist and a bunch of exceptional people and organisations jumped onboard the first open source bid to UK government ever. I offered a small piece on my favourite area (multi-domain knowledge exchange and the development of trust in communities across time), which I hope was of use, and was completely wow-ed by the level of collaboration that all the participants displayed.
From a cold standing start. It was gob-smacking. And public - which I think is the most impressive part - that all of us were happy to share our ideas, pool our knowledge and say "anyone can read what we think" - genuinely turning the pitch process on its head.
Simon Berry writes on the Open Innovation Exchange site:
Here's the proof. The bid on its way from bike to bid reception. I bumped into John Craig in reception which was nice. I am sure it was a coincidence or maybe it was because we were causing a bit of concern setting up to film outside! But it felt good anyway.
He was friendly and, reading between the lines, I think he's been really interested in the approach we've taken. They are expecting "a number" of bids and I got the impression that it was number about halfway-ish between 15 and 25. So, as we breath a sigh of relief and can get our lives back, the hard work starts for them.
You can download the final bid (4M pdf) without figures because that would breach tender rules, and also see how we got there with earlier drafts.
We aren't stopping now. The site will remain open to gather further ideas, and also - we hope - to meet other people interested in open collaborations, whether for bids or other projects. Come on over. You can register and get blogging rights, or just comment.
Oh yes, bid competitors welcome too. If you want to go naked at this late stage we'll happily feature your proposals too.
Update: video is up now.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, innovation, nptech, nptechuk, open source, openinex
great initative david! i sincerely wish you and the group the best!
m
Posted by: Matt O'Neill | May 14, 2007 at 06:41 PM