Weekly update [2 Dec 2013]
Now that we have more of a team on board, focused on the Community of Excellence, we've been taking a bit of time to collaboratively define our ideas and vision for how the space might evolve from here. The team here had a great preliminary session on that on Friday, and hope to have more to share in the coming weeks.
One of the key themes that have come up for us is that we want to allow for the Community to have more ownership of the space and what happens there. So if you're a member of the Community, we'd love your input into that process too. We've setup a Community of Excellence Development group in the space as a place to share your thoughts (and where we can post questions etc.)—let us know if you'd like to be part of that group.
A good chunk of my time this past week was invested in attendance at a workshop on cross-sectoral collaboration, co-hosted by The Difference, the Centre for Social Impact, Social Ventures Australia, and others. It brought together around 55 participants from Government, NGOs and non-profits, and the commercial sector to explore how collaboration might be encouraged or enhanced in the pursuit of positive social change.
It was a thought-provoking two days, with a number of themes coming to the fore (from my perspective). One was ensuring that the people we aim to serve are at the forefront of our thinking and processes, to ensure their voice is not only present but heard and integral to what we do. A strong emphasis on design thinking approaches was also present, as was the idea of legible practice. Evaluation was another theme that was pretty prevalent—how do we ensure we get visibility on the effectiveness of what we do in achieving real outcomes (not just outputs).
And of course there were loads of new connections made between participants. As is so often the case I at such events, there wasn't enough opportunity to connect with so many of the interesting and inspiring people who were there. But even so, we're looking forward to further exploring some of the sparks that emanated from the sessions and continuing in sharing our collaborative approaches with the broader community.