We’re doing it! Open Working & Reuse programme is happening!
Open working. Working in the open. Agile Comms. Reuse.
Terms that are bandied about and can be confusing to anyone not working with these subjects daily. Much like a comic-book novice might be when encountering The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider Man 2099 or The Ultimate Spider Man for the first time. They are the same, but also different.
Want to learn more about what it is and — more importantly — how you can turn open working into the superhero your organisation needs AND deserves right now (oooh a rogue DC reference)? Then unlike John Jonah Jameson Jr, I have GOOD NEWS for you! Third Sector Lab is kicking off the first pilot version of its Open Working and Reuse for Funders and Grantees programme in a couple of weeks!
Dive into the Spider-Verse with me…
What is our programme?
Ross McCulloch spoke to a lovely group of grant makers at the a Scottish Funders symposium and waxed lyrical about the virtues of Spi… I mean, Open Working & Reuse back in February.
Would they all be open to learning more about how to apply these principles and practices of being open and transparent in their own organisations? Heck yes they would!
Did we know exactly how to do it and move everything smoothly forward in one fell swoop? Heck no we didn’t!
Much like Spidey needing to learn how to swing from building to building, we needed to figure out where the best anchor points were and what the optimum velocity would be. (You best believe this simile will be stretched like web).
After many chats between us and with funders, the conclusion we came to was that it would be best to start where we are and work with what we have. We removed as much as possible of the admin burden from the process (capacity is always a concern with new things), and have ended up with a lovely bunch of ideas that should give anyone joining us a leg up with all this openly reusing agile stuff.
Over the course of 8 weeks, we will run workshops to equip participants with the right understanding and skills to work in the open themselves. One of the workshops will be a masterclass run by none other than Giles Turnbull, the man who literally wrote the book on agile comms.
To encourage learning by doing, we will offer time-boxed, quiet spaces to write about their work every week. This is properly practicing what we preach as we are reusing this concept from Joe Roberson — he wrote about it here.
In addition to that sign ups will get a weekly newsletter highlighting ideas, tips and resources from our Open Working Toolkit. Another bit of reuse — we did simillar when we worked as OWL (the Open Working LineUp with Christine Cawthorne, Joe Roberson, Matthew McStravick & Ross McCulloch) and it worked well then.
Who is it for?
Initially we are opening this programme up to the Scottish funders Ross spoke to before, and their grantees. If the programme is a success, we will open it up to a wider audience in future iterations.
Although we like to keep resources as open and accessible as possible, one of the conditions for joining this programme is that you have permission to write about your work in a professional capacity. As we will be learning by doing (i.e. publishing writing on a weekly basis, like Peter Parker), it wouldn’t make sense to join if you can’t publish your work.
When is it happening?
We are starting in w/c 20th June — the first workshop is two weeks today!
You can sign up here. Places are limited, but if you are unsuccessful this time around, keep an eye out on ye olde internet (the Third Sector Lab twitter account is your safest bet) because we are applying for funding to extend this work beyond August.
That will do for this week’s weeknote/blog. Thanks for reading and stay safe web-heads! (Because you are reading this on the internet, but also because it is a Spider-Man reference, get it?!) (The best jokes are the ones you have to explain, AMIRITE?).
(In case there was any doubt, the tone I aim for with these writing is informative yet…
with thanks to Moira Rose for the impeccable embodiment of the concept.)
