Digital Collaborations was the final event of Doing It With Others: Why Proper Collaboration Really Matters, the ICR’s second annual conference and, with circumstances being what they are, it couldn’t have been more apt.

Held as an online knowledge exchange, the event was a chance to talk about one of the European projects on which PVM is a partner: Co-Engage, although naturally the talk also turned to the necessity of digital collaboration as we live through the age of COVID-19.

The panel of speakers included Martin Barthel (CRN), Belén Fernandez (l’Échappée des Copropriétés), and PVM’s own Hayley Trowbridge. Martin gave a great overview of the Co-Engage, a project bringing together a range of best practices for engaging citizens across Europe, which the participants were very excited about. Next, Belén posed questions on her own experience of taking her work online – an environment to which it’s not normally suited – during the global pandemic. The participants found this very engaging and there was much discussion on whether we’re evolving online consciously, or whether we are being pushed by circumstance into something less than ideal. Finally, Hayley spoke on taking storytelling online, reflecting on what PVM has learned over the last few months and the tools we’ve been using.

After our panel spoke, we opened the virtual floor to a lively and interesting discussion on our own experiences of and musings on digital collaborations. It was exciting to see so many new collaborations forming, both in the main room and in the text chat, with participants networking with each other and forming new connections.

Digital Collaborations was a great way to end what had proved to be a very different annual conference. It was our most international event, with UK participants joined by those from Germany, France, Hungary and even Australia (this is the furthest flung participant we’ve ever had, as well as the latest anyone has ever stayed up for one of our events!). It brought up interesting questions and endless debate during a time when digital collaborations have become an absolute necessity.

Lockdown working has presented a fair few challenges for PVM. We’re a largely face-to-face organisation: delivering training, attending project meetings, performing dialogue interviews… It’s all done in person.

As a result, we’ve had to rethink a lot of things. Where we’ve been able to, things are being done remotely. Workshops, knowledge exchanges and meetings have been moved online and we’ve all become experts in a range of video conferencing software and online collaboration tools. Where online hasn’t been a possibility projects have been paused with their deadlines extended, to be picked up again once lockdown measures have eased.

This has triggered a huge rethink in our workflow priorities. Projects that, just weeks ago, were massive priorities with imminent milestones have now shuffled to the back of the queue while work that has been put off in favour of more pressing deadlines (you know how it can be…) has suddenly found itself in the foreground.

For Sarah, this meant spending May taking a deep dive into our curation reports for the CoSIE project to form one of our project deliverables. The deliverable itself isn’t due for a good few months yet, but getting these analyses drafted now means that later this year the team isn’t juggling writing several thousand words, editing stories into a film, and trying to catch up with projects that have been on-hold.

So what are the curation reports?

The curation reports form a key part of the Community Reporting methodology. It involves looking at the stories gathered, pulling out the key themes that span them, and writing them up into an analysis that summarises our findings.

For the CoSIE project, this means looking at the stories gathered in each of the pilot projects. For Sarah, this meant examining the stories from Houten and Nieuwegein (both in The Netherlands), and Hungary, resulting in around 11,000 words of analysis. The insights gleaned were sometimes surprising. For instance, the Hungarian pilot which is all about rediscovering home economics and self-sustainability in disadvantaged communities, demonstrated that many of the participants show that there is a large demand for homemade produce, so much so that some participants are looking at turning their home enterprises into small businesses. Some stories, meanwhile, demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of co-creation – sometimes showing it can only work when everyone involved is wholeheartedly invested.

While lockdown has forced us to reassess our entire working practice, it has perhaps given us opportunity to take time over things we would have ordinarily put back, and given us the time and space to properly examine them without distractions.

That being said, we can’t wait to be back organising workshops and conferences, and delivering training again.

Greece is one of the few countries that effectively managed to shut down the spread of COVID-19 before it really had a chance to take hold, and they are seen as one of the success stories of the pandemic. However, out of their lockdown measures, an unforeseen issue is arising, surrounding the use of digital tools in education settings.

One of our Eurospectives partners, Stephanos Cherouvis of Elliogermaniki Agogi has written a fascinating blog over on the Eurospectives site to shed some light on the ongoing saga.

On the Eurospectives project, our partners have been producing blogs on the affect of lockdown on themselves, their organisations and the project.

Our Italian partner, COSV, have written a fascinating blog about how the digital world has enabled them to keep working both nationally and internationally.

At the Eurospectives meeting in Athens in March we were lucky enough to have filmmaker Glenda Rome on board.

At the meeting, she screened a film she had facilitated with a group of older people from the LGBT community in Glasgow, called Return To the Closet?. The film was made last year and has had a positive impact, with health and social care providers now using the film as an equality and diversity training tool for their staff.

Since the meeting, Kath interviewed Glenda about the film (via Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions) and what strategies were put in place to ensure social impact was achieved. You can watch the interview below.