An excellent commentary and explanation about on-line facilitation from Nancy White over at Full Circle. Very topical for me at the moment as I begin a new contract working as Interim Head of the Information Authority, a new Secretariat sponsored by the DfES and the LSC. One of the key responsibilities for this newly established body (the Information Authority) is to balance need against burden for all information and reporting requirements across the education sector.
My initial thoughts were along the lines of establishing a facilitated stakeholder community, consisting of all interested people, groups and agencies across the further education sector, and through this ‘community’, encourage transparency on the impact (burden) of requests for new or changed information. Typical changes are in the way that schools and colleges measure success, and change requests can originate from many different sources, from Ministers and government bodies (e.g. Ofsted) to individual schools and colleges.
However, I soon learnt there is a language issue to overcome first. My initial soundings on the concept of using an on-line community approach to evaluate, process and agree changes to data standards and reporting requirements did not go down too well, and the concept of employing on-line facilitator’s for managing change though this embryonic community was akin to talking about encounters of the third kind!
However, I’ve made some headway by making sure that instead of discussing ‘communities’, I refer instead to ’stakeholder collaboration’, which is going to require ‘change coordinators’ to manage discussion and connections between the stakeholders (thus, for on-line facilitator, read ‘change coordinator).
So lesson learnt here – speak the language that people you are working with understand. The concepts of communities (of interest or of practice) and on-line facilitation are steps into the unknown for some people, and anything unknown is perceived as a project risk!
More of this later when I’ve either been given the go ahead (or not) to progress with my ’stakeholder collaboration’ and ‘change coordinator’ strategy.
My thanks to Nancy for enabling me to produce the job specification for my ‘change coordinators’ from her posting!
Dave Briggs over at LGNemedia has assembled an excellent montage describing Social Media as a vehicle for collaboration and knowledge sharing. I’m looking forward to meeting Dave today at the IDeA’s Community of Practice Workshop, which I’m co-hosting. We’ve also got Ed Mitchell and Hilary Messeter from the National College of School Leadership who will sharing their considerable knowledge of on-line facilitation with the assembled delegates, who are all members of the IDeA’s Facilitator’s Community of Practice
This is a neat little video explaining RSS is plain English. Note – it requires Flash Player 8.
Lucas McDonnell lists 44 essential KM sites and blogs on his Uncommon Knowledge blog. I regularly visit abut half the sites he lists, so I need to go and check out the other half. I guess the term ‘essential’ is rather subjective, and what constitutes a good KM blog or site is very much a personal choice. My own list covers 20 or sources not mentioned by Lucas (listed on my blog sidebar). Discovering new and compelling web sites and blogs is all part of the self-learning element of KM.
Clearly I’ve been remiss in my recent blog and news reading since I only came across Wikileaks by accident. A bit embarrassing really given the name of my blog!
The blurb on the site says:
" Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable
Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our
primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet
bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be
of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical
behaviour in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum
political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia
and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.2 million
documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."
I couldn’t find any evidence of the 1.2 million documents they refer to, though the FAQs section refers to a live date of March 2007. I can only assume the launch is delayed pending getting the dirt on Gordon Brown’s ‘Great Pensions Robbery"!
Whether the site turns out to have any authoritative content on it, or is just merely a repository of innuendo and gossip remains to be seen. Should I be subscribing I wonder?!
‘Knowledge Management’ (KM) is a term that’s been bandied around since the mid 1990’s, with much debate as to what it actually means. The wikipedia definition is a reasonable starting point, but you still get the vociferous few who will take the literal meaning and argue that you can’t manage (tacit) knowledge, plus a confetti (I quite like that description) of academic papers that provide a forensic analysis of the ‘KM’ term. Fortunately, there are always two sides to every argument, and at least for me, the Dave Snowdon blog ‘Whence goeth KM’ provides a more balanced and reasoned discussion on the topic.
Anyway, one point which I trust won’t be in dispute is the fact that KM has spawned an entire industry – from academic dissertations on human cognition (how the brain thinks), to software vendors offering hierarchical and work flow-driven architectures as a panacea for everyone’s knowledge and information needs.
If things weren’t complicated enough, we now have a relatively new term to confuse all but the army of consultants who thrive on giving complicated labels to simple behaviours – ‘Social Computing’.
Now, in my mind, I can’t make a clear distinction between KM and Social Computing, except that KM is part of a broader framework that can exist independent of technology, and Social Computing is the application of KM through software tools and technology. But on reflection – I guess that is a clear distinction!
It seems that Social Computing has moved beyond the early hierarchical and work flow-driven systems and is providing a much flatter architecture with far more emphasis on peer-to-peer connectivity and disinter mediation of the web publishing process – i.e. everyone can be a publisher. Information and KM professionals are starting to become knowledge facilitators, and there is a surely an opportunity here for the re-invention of the traditional Librarian role – if only they would grasp it.
Social Commuting is going to have (already is having?) a disruptive effect on organisations that are slow to adapt to new technologies, where staff are getting more confident about using software services and applications that sit outside the corporate firewall. ICT departments are going to find this trend difficult to ignore, though I’ve already witnessed the Luddite trend in some organisations who’s initial reaction is just to lock down the firewall and prevent access to the facilities. Perversely, this is creating a growing community of hobbyists who are creating their own Social Computing environments (see Lgknowledge as a good example for the public sector) in their own time and space – away from the restrictions of the work environment.
So, is Social Computing the next best thing since sliced bread? I believe it is. Social Computing can transform KM, shifting the emphasis from repositories and taxonomies, which are hard to build and maintain, to more intuitive, tacit knowledge sharing. Social Computing is becoming the 21st Century KM, moving it from an often too academic exercise, or imited by corporate (command and control driven) thinking, into the real world of people sharing knowledge and expertise with each other naturally, without even thinking about it. Pity we have to give it a label really!