Public Involvement

The Partnership is having one of those moments of corporate introspection when we look at what we do and think about the best way to explain it to our clients - present and future - and to ourselves too.

(jump to our strap-line competition here)

So we have done a bit of brainstorming and come up with twenty suggestions on how we might define what we offer to clients and encapsulate that in a pithy and memorable way. The new phrase will go as part of a new look on our website.

We need an outside eye and would like to invite you to help us choose which one describes us best. Our current account of ourselves and what we do can be seen at www.mooreadamsoncraig.co.uk and the associated blog site here (www.publicinvolvement.org.uk) site.

This is, as many readers will at once realise, is an example of the approach know as ‘crowdsourcing’. The phrase first appeared in an article in Wired in 2006 and the author Jeff Howe defined it as

“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.“

Let’s Go Crowdsourcing

The current calls for user engagement and involvement can perhaps be seen as being part of that phenomenon with organisations formerly closed to the user interest and totally ‘captured’ by provider interests, open themselves up and unblock their ears to the external voice.

The new LINks organisations are intended to be important players in collecting and amplifying the voice of the crowd of users. The regulators in health and social care – at the moment plural as in the Healthcare Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection but soon to be singular: the Care Quality Commission – are touring the country to meet LINks people and work with them on the best way to feed into their assessment and inspection programmes. At the Cambridge event in September, it was very heartening to sit around the table with so many organisations focussing on how to make this work. The third sector who are working both as Host organisations as well as LINk member were well represented – Voluntary Norfolk was there (but not Compulsory Norfolk – no doubt no one had told them they had to come).

How we all laughed and there was remarkably little cynicism as in “we have been here before“. It would be wonderful if the regulators and indeed the Department of Health and other central government departments did work out a relationship with the local LINks that did not make the latter the poor bloody infantry of the regulatory system acting as unpaid data collectors for their assessment programmes while local issues and programmes were ignored. Instead there is room for a mutually profitable concordat between the individual and local voice of the user and those working at the national (English) level. Perhaps this time the views of the crowds outside the system really will count.

Back to our strap-line competition

Our suggested strap-lines / phrases are listed below and you are invited to pick your top 3 choices and the one you feel works best. Closing date 15th October 2008. Thank you.

The winners i.e. all those choosing what we think is the best out of our suggestions or even more excitingly coming up with one of their own which the Partners think hits the spot will be recognised as a hero/es. The choices of the Partners are open to discussion, scorn and mockery but we are very thick skinned given the amount of that sort of deplorable behaviour in our own meetings. So feel free to speak out and create.

Read the strap-lines and tell us your views here, or contribute by leaving a comment.