These are my links for February 28th through March 3rd:
web20-21stcentury-tools – home – A great collection of Web2.0 tools, focused on educators, but a valuable resource list for anyone interested in Social Media
Improving data visualisation for the public sector – Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to others to help them make robust decisions based on the data being presented. This site supports public sector researchers improve the way that they visualise data, by providing good practice examples and case studies, practical and step-by-step guides on how to visualise data, and links to more detailed resources.
Making government more open and social | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Can social tools and community-based approaches truly help our government function better and operate more efficiently? Will open access to government data create important new opportunities for citizens and increase transparency?
These two questions are currently top-of-mind in many public sector policy discussions this year. The questions also herald new forces at work in transforming the government landscape in many countries around the world in 2010, particularly as we’ll see, the United states.
E4 Longdistance Walk – If you know John Hayes (Services Director at IDeA) you may want to follow his new adventure: "Having worked non-stop for over thirty years I have now decided to do something completely different. I'm going to walk from Tarifa, the most southerly point in Spain, to Budapest. I'm following the route of the E4 European Long Distance Walk and I think I might be the first person to do it. "
I’ve just completed my first ‘Hot Seat’ session for the IDeA Communities of Practice. My specialist subject “The Knowledge Hub”. I think I managed to answer all of the questions correctly, and was encouraged to see that we had over 470 page views during the 2-hour session. I was encouraged by the interest in this project from such a wide variety of users. Some challenging questions as well – all available at the Facilitation Now! conference 26th Feb.
However, the problem is not information overload but rather filter failure, according to Clay Shirky.
In traditional knowledge management the focus has been on quantity, not quality. Organizations have struggled to collect all the knowledge that their workers possess.
The goal was simply to collect all the individual knowledge in one big common knowledge base.
Very few companies had success with this strategy, but the ones that actually had success was facing a different problem: information overload .
Welcome to the London Datastore | London DataStore – This is where we’ll be releasing all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge.
Releasing GLA data is just the beginning though and we’ll be using our connections and influence to request and cajole other public sector organisations into following suit.
I think that most community of practice (CoP) facilitators or moderators will recognise the challenge in getting conversations started within the community. The ratio of ‘lurkers’ to ‘contributors’ is one of the standard indicators that should be measured for any CoP in order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and health of the CoP. It’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will be a contributor, and the fact that members don’t contribute doesn’t mean they are not getting some value from the CoP. However, there’s nothing wrong in encouraging more contributions, and I’ve seen various incentives used to increase contribution rates.
I thought this particular scheme being implemented for the local government CoP platform was particularly inventive, and I’ll be interested to see how successful it is (I have access to the platform-wide metrics). This message was sent out to all registered users of the CoP platform:
Dear CoP member,
It hasn’t been long since communities of practice welcomed its 50,000th member, yet we’ve hardly had time to register such a momentous milestone before that number is actually closer to the 55,000 member mark. And with a pool of over a thousand different communities to choose from, the potential benefits to the local government and wider public sector of those members sharing what they know grows significantly every day.
It’s no surprise to hear that the secret behind the platform’s success is its members – you! Without you, there would be nothing to share, no one to share with, and the variety and vibrancy of many communities wouldn’t be close to the level they are today.
To celebrate reaching this milestone, we want to say thank you by giving something back to all you sharers out there.
So, from February 16, we’re beginning a new campaign, Everyone ’s a sharer! where the first hundred CoP members each month to make their very first contribution on the platform will receive a small-but-tasty appreciation of our gratitude, with further reward going to each month’s top sharers, as well as to those members who make the highest number of contributions.
We’re also looking into starting a recognition system for those who make a lot of contributions to communities. In the coming months, members who make over 50 contributions will see a bronze heart appear on their profile; 100 contributions will be silver; and 150 gold.
So get involved by contributing as much as you can to your communities, and share your knowledge. Because after all…
… Everyone ’s a sharer!
Hopefully this post might stimulate some more ideas on how to increase contribution rates from those involved in CoPs. I would add this mantra for CoP facilitators/moderators: “Know who your contributors are….and look after them!”
National Knowledge Service Homepage – The mission of the National Knowledge Service, set out in the strategy of NHS Connecting for Health, is to ensure that every decision made by a patient or a healthcare professional can be supported by best current evidence. Knowledge is like water and access to clean, clear knowledge is a right. Knowledge, like water, needs to be managed and every healthcare organisation needs to manage knowledge, even more carefully than they manage money. Resources to support these activities are available at the National Library for Knowledge Management.
Explaining social media to senior managers by Michele Ide-Smith – This week I had the opportunity to present to senior managers in my organisation (a local authority) to explain what social media is, how it is affecting us and why we need to develop a social media strategy. The key message of the presentation was:
“People are having conversations about us online, but we are not part of those conversations.”
For me this was a great opportunity to get buy-in from the very top of the organisation to the development of a social media strategy. We already have a project underway to develop a social media framework (strategy, policy, guidelines and tools) which has arisen as a result of demand from services and growing awareness of the usage of social media tools by citizens.
Posted on February 12, 2010 by Steve Dale in Delicious Links
These are my links for February 7th through February 12th:
Social Media Case Studies | The Parallax View – There’s more and more case studies on social media, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. Keeping track of them all is an on-going project. Here’s some of the ones I’ve been looking at lately. This is not meant to be a definitive list, it’s more like a set of bookmarks, but if there’s a really good one I’ve missed out, please add a comment* or ping me on Twitter, on my remiss and I’ll add it.
OneSocialWeb – Creating a free, open, and decentralized social networking platform. – The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.
Social Media is growing in its adoption across all areas of society, including Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). To gain a current picture of this rapidly developing area within UK Higher Education Institutions, research has recently been conducted into the Challenges, Usage and Benefits of Social Media within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
Prospect talks to the father of the world wide web « Prospect Magazine – On 5th January, just before the public launch of data.gov.uk, Prospect’s Tom Chatfield spoke to Tim Berners-Lee about how Berners-Lee helped the government to open up public data. On 7th January, Chatfield spoke to Berners-Lee’s friend and colleague Nigel Shadbolt about his role in the project. The edited highlights of both conversations are below.
Linked Data | Linked Data – Connect Distributed Data across the Web – Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF." This site exists to provide a home for, or pointers to, resources from across the Linked Data community.
LocalGovCamp London – An event for anyone interested in social media and digital engagement, and its relevance to local authorities.
LocalGovCamp London – part of a series of UK-wide LocalGovCamps
Most seven year old's are unaware of the devastation going on around them, let alone what they see on TV. Yet one little boy decided after watching the horror on the news he wanted to help raise money to send to the haiti children and people who are now homeless and hungry.
He originally decided £500 but after publicity of his challenge hit local news, he has so far raises £35,000.
I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more of a groundswell of discontent amongst users who have no other choice but to use Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) as their interface to the web world. I’m thinking primarily of public sector workers who probably had this installed on their PCs several years ago along with the perfunctory use of Sharepoint. I have to assume that in most cases they don’t know what they are missing with Social Web enabled browsers such as Firefox or Chrome. Maybe there are some (a minority?) who do use alternative or more up to date browsers on their home PCs and laptops who do feel the frustration of stepping back in time whenever they enter their workplace, but I don’t think they have yet organised themselves into a sufficiently powerful lobbying group that will create the conditions for change.
Thanks to the efforts of Tom Watson MP, at least the issue has been given some focus in central government, subsequent to a series of parliamentary questions he raised requesting information about plans to upgrade from IE6. The underlying reason for the requests was that IE6 is not only less secure than later versions of the browser, but it limits or prevents staff making effective use of social media. Tom quite rightly thought that this was a potential staff productivity issue. It’s slightly paradoxical that the one department who should be most worried about security is the only department that has no plans for upgrading.
MOD sticks with insecure browser: According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change.
But where is the voice of Local Government? Who is lobbying for change in local councils? It’s all very quiet over at the LGA, “the voice of the local government sector” to quote from their website. Maybe they don’t see this as cost-saving measure, which is perhaps understandable if you take the short term (some may argue ‘myopic’) view. I’m assuming here that reluctance to upgrade from IE6 is likely to be because of cost; most internal websites (e.g. intranets) within Gov/Local Gov will have been tailored to work with the IE6 browser, and since IE6 did not follow W3C standards (Microsoft deciding at the time that they were above following any standard other than their own), any other browser type (Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.) would not render the content correctly. They (Microsoft) have since seen the error of their ways and have fallen into line with globally agreed standards when they released IE7 and IE8. The problem will be making changes to all of the legacy websites to work correctly with a new browser version.
From this perspective yes, there is a cost, but what appears to have been forgotten is that any new web services or enhancements to existing websites have to be made backwards compatible to IE6. I can speak with a bit of authority here because I’ve been involved with the development of the IDEA Communities of Practice platform over the past 5 years. I know for a fact that for every change and enhancement to the website, around 15-20% of the cost goes into making it work with IE6. I estimate this to have cost almost £100k over the 5 years. If we took these same figures, i.e. 15-20% of website development costs going into ensuring compatibility with IE6, multiplied by the 400 or so local authority websites (and not even counting the fire services, the police and other agency websites) we end up with a pretty significant cost. I’m not quite sure how this squares with the LGA’s priority for 2009/100 of “Efficiency and value for money”.
But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps this article from Craig Grannell sums the issue up more succinctly than I can, abstract below:
Craig Grannell asks designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it.
Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson goes further, squarely blaming IE6 for “hindering the development of the web”, due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML. Many in the industry tell such tales: horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug. “If anything, things will get worse, since we’re now battling three versions: 6, 7 and 8,” says Tom Muller of Kleber. “They all display content slightly differently and we regularly work up a site in Firefox or Safari, only to spend a day figuring out why our valid, semantic code doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.”
But aside from cost, there is the other issue I alluded to at the start of this article, i.e. productivity of staff. We’re increasingly recognising the power of social media tools and the social web to connect people with similar interests; to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing; to get a better understanding of what people think about gov/local gov services and how they can be improved. We need to give staff working in the public sector access to the same tools and facilities that ordinary citizens are using to connect, share and collaborate. Doing nothing is not an option, and is likely to make the gap between technologies that are available a private user and what is available to a public sector worker even greater. Fore example:
YouTube to stop IE6 support: YouTube will no longer support Internet Explorer 6, TechRadar can confirm, with Google beginning to roll out warnings to those accessing the video site that they should update to a better browser.
And I’m sure we’re going to be seeing a lot of similar announcements in the coming year.
So, what do we do about it (if we’re passionate enough about the topic)?
I’d like to see a similar survey to that instigated by Tom Watson for central government, but this time getting information on council plans for upgrading from IE6. However, I assume this may have to be through the Freedom of Information route, since I’m not aware if or how a parliamentary question would solicit this information – unless CLG were obliged to supply it on behalf of all local councils in England and Wales.
In anticipation of cost being the main barrier for most councils, I’d like to see a policy agreed whereby staff could use an alternative browser for accessing social media websites and as a general productivity tool, whilst still using IE6 for accessing internally-dependent websites, thus circumnavigating the issues of cost. If necessary, and to accommodate the natural desire of IT departments to lock down all installed software, staff or their department could make the business case for having Firefox installed and then IT enable this as a Group Policy.
I’d be interested to know where SOCITM stood on this issue, and whether they felt passionate enough about it to be a catalyst for change. After all, they are representing the IT managers. I have in fact written to them recently to solicit their views on all of this.
Other than this, I can only encourage those who are directly affected by their company’s/organisation’s reluctance to recognise this as an important issue to be tackled this year, to lobby their managers for change, and to join together in making more a of a noise. Maybe a bit of crowd-sourcing in the Social Web!
Government to set up its own cloud computing system | Technology | guardian.co.uk – The government has unveiled a sweeping strategy to create its own internal "cloud computing" system – such as that used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon – as part of a radical plan that it claims could save up to £3.2bn a year from an annual bill of at least £16bn.
The key part of the new strategy, outlined by the Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, will be the concentration of government computing power into a series of about a dozen highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m to build, which will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities.
The government will also push for "open source" software to be used more widely among central and local government's 4m desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the standard on PCs in government, such as the NHS, which is one of the largest users in Europe.
I’m not the only addict, though. On Google there are 402,000 results for “social media addiction.” Someone even made a rap video about social media addiction.
These are my links for January 20th through January 25th:
Focus: IDeA Communities of Practice « E-Government Bulletin Live – The large and growing network of collaborative tools that make up the ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP) project, hosted by the local government Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), is a rare ‘Web 2.0’ success story in the UK public sector.
CoP (http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/) began in the autumn of 2006 as a pilot project testing around 100 discussion forums with 5,000 council managers. The bespoke technology used to run the networks was developed by Conseq and runs on the IDeA’s existing web publishing infrastructure using IBM WebSphere Application Server and DB2 Universal Database.
ukgc – home – A wiki set up to house content from the UKGovCamp event, held in London on 23 January 2010.
A first step towards freeing London’s data | London DataStore – Welcome to the prototype Datastore for London. This is where we’ll be releasing all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge. Releasing GLA data is just the beginning though and we’ll be using our connections and influence to request and cajole other public sector organisations into following suit. Our formal launch is at the end of January 2010 with a larger number of data packages and an improved user interface. In the mean time join the conversation and give us your thoughts and feedback – we want to make this site work for you.
