As you may know, u.lab is a massive online course (MOOC) run by MIT professor Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute. It’s a globally available, free course that lots of people across Scotland have participated in (see www.ulabscotland.com for more).

u.lab Scotland has space within the online platform (called edX) to share material we generate here in Scotland – we call this the ‘SMOOC’ (Scottish Massive Open Online Course).

In the first two years, the focus of the content was interviews with people applying innovative approaches to making a positive difference to communities and organisations, suggesting connections to concepts covered in u.lab.

This year, and building on the 2016 report we did of the u.lab Scotland story so far, we are in a stronger position to begin to ‘crowd source’ content – so a small group of us from the u.lab sensing team got together to prototype a way to do this.

We’re starting small. Sourcing existing films and making a few new ones that show how ways of working explored in u.lab are coming to life across Scotland.

We’re now ready to share what we’ve come up with here – a blog a week in the run up to the u.lab live session.

In the first week, we shared a brand new film from Coproduction Network Scotland called ‘Created by Conversation’ – you can see this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai7cNgdxX6c

This is the text that goes with it on EdX:

In Scotland, we are finding that the ‘U’ is helping connect people who are working for positive change.

U.lab Scotland is ‘co-initiating’ a community of change makers who are finding a common language, understanding and practice that seems to speed up our ability to  create positive change in our communities.

For example, there is a growing group of people interested in how people who use public services can have a strong voice in shaping how they are designed and run (sometimes called ‘co-production’).

One example of co-production in Scotland today is shown in a film called ‘Created by Conversation’.

It tells the story of bringing about a new partnership between people who have been released from prison, private sector companies offering jobs to these people, and government.    At its heart, the story is about changing how we listen to each other in order to ‘let go’ and open up to new possibilities (‘open heart’).

Coming next:

– Peter Ashe will blog about inviting analysts in Scotlands’ National Health Service to get out and meet the people behind their data; and

– Kuladharini from Scottish Recovery Consortium will reflect on a 500 mile ‘sensing journey’ in support of Scotland’s recovery community; and

Katy McNeil will tell a story of turning a ‘hunch’ into a prototype at CivTech (r) Edinburgh – an ‘innovation accelerator’ (stay tuned to learn about what that is…)

• For our final EdX content, we are looking to highlight some examples of creating prototypes – and then scaling them up. Do you have a story that might help others really understand how to do prototyping? Get in touch with Nick Wilding or Keira Oliver as soon as possible if so…