Having only just seen the Exalead press release, I’m reminded of a significant new enhancement that we introduced to the IDeA Communities of Practice (CoP) web platform earlier this year. The Exalead search service provides each CoP with a facility for creating a personalised community list of websites that enables more focussed and relevant search results to be returned for their particular domain of interest. Community members have the ability to select or deselect any of the web sites in the community list for each web search query they submit, providing greater control over the number and relevance of results returned.
Having a personalised community list of web sites has the effect of narrowing the web search to just these sites, which the community members will have previously verified as having content more relevant to their domain of interest. For example, a search for ‘Local Area Agreements’ on Google returns almost 49 million results. A similar search limited to the Regional Centre of Excellence web sites returns 136 results, all of which are likely to have more contextual relevance than the wider web search.
This is just one of the many enhancements to the platform that is scheduled for implementation this year. More about the other enhancements will be published in this blog over the coming months.
My version of the personalised search facility that was issued to our CoP users: personalised-search-release-note-final-08jan08.
I had a meting today with an organisation – HeartsnSoul – who want to create a community web site to bring people with learning difficulties together with potential employers. They want to encourage use of personal blogs for their users and have a virtual meeting place (e.g. forum) where their users can ‘meet’ potential employers.
I am looking into the issues and dependencies for providing all this through our existing CoP platform , but I think the interface design requirements may exceed the available budget and there may be implications for the future management and maintenance for what would have to be a separate bespoke development.
I was wondering if anyone had any experience with designing, developing or using similar sites (i.e. with heavy emphasis on accessibility and usability), blending social media applications with a simple and intuitive front end design? Or perhaps anyone with experience in this whole area of bridging the digital divide for socially excluded groups. If so, I should be very grateful if you would contact me.
Possibly one of many self-organising groups that are emerging on the back of the social networking revolution, I attended the Tuttle Club Breakfast yesterday, organised by Lloyd Davis. It was (of course) a great opportunity to meet new people, discover interesting new projects and make new friends. I’m starting to think that “Web 2.0″ and “Social Media” are becoming clichés but these were the memes that ultimately connected us. To use Lloyd’s words:
Social Media and the new world of work. Many of us are either working on our own or else in loose associations or else within an organisation but in partnership with a range of independent suppliers and contractors. None of us expect our careers to be anything like those of our parents’ generation. How do we make sense of it, how do we keep our heads above water and how can getting to grips with social media help us out?
The event was run along the same lines as an Open Space, where attendees gravitated towards the topics proposed by – well – those who had a topic to propose. These included things like:
- Building a list of interesting folk to talk to BERR (Jane O’Loughlin)
- Combining relentless creativity with social media (Steve Lawson)
- Turning your passion into something that makes money (Pippa Crawford & Dan McQuillan)
- Finding new clients online (Rebecca Caroe)
- Business podcasting (Mike O’Hara)
- Organisation Lite (David Wilcox & Jemima Gibbons)
I believe there is much yet to come from this eclectic assembly of talent and skills – a lot of latent energy just bursting to innovate! Many of the breakfast goup have been meeting regularly every Friday morning as part of the Social Media Cafe. (also Facebook Group). So – watch that space – or better still – join in!
Interesting commentary from Dion Hinchliffe about the changing business landscape being heralded on the back of the Enterprise 2.0 space, which Forrestor predicts will be a $4.6 billion (£2.3 billion) within 5 years.
Dion goes on to reference the two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This being the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This model is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organisations that are less strongly hierarchical.
I should note that I’m witnessing this ‘push’ model at first hand through the rapid take-up of social networking and social media applications across the local government sector as part of the development of communities of practice across the sector. The conundrum here is that this is happening across almost exclusively hierarchical organisations.
I fully concur on Dion’s conclusion that:
“The challenge will be learning how to apply these new models effectively to business while not strangling them with the traditional aspects of enterprise software that can greatly limit their potential and have led to poor outcomes and excessive structure in the past. The good news: Most likely they will be hard to stop as Web 2.0 applications become increasingly commonplace in our organizations over the next few years. The bad news: Most organizations will take years learning how to create environments that fully allow the leverage of these tools.”
This latter point resonates with my own experience in promoting Web 2.0 technologies and processes for facilitating more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing across the traditionally silo’d mentality of public sector organisations. There’s a tendency for some people to get mesmerised by the technology at the expense of investing time and effort in creating a collaborative workplace.
I believe it’s a classic case of applying the ‘80:20′ rule, i.e. for every £20 (or $20) spent on the technology, organisations should be investing £80 (or $80) on ensuring its being used effectively. In other words, don’t assume that everyone in the workplace has the skills to collaborate effectively, and recognise that sometimes the culture may be working against open collaboration.
I highly recommend the recently published white paper – “Building a collaborative workspace” – by Shawn Callahan, Mark Shenck and Nancy White. The paper goes some way to redressing the balance between Web 2.0 technology solutions and the skills, processes and techniques required to ensure the technology is used effectively. I’ve blogged on this topic previously (It’s not the technology…its the people that matter), but I think the issue is very elegantly summarised by the authors of this paper as follows:-
“Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless.
Our challenge doesn’t stop there. An organisation’s ability to support collaboration is highly dependent on its own organisational culture. Some cultures foster collaboration while others stop it dead in its tracks.
To make matters worse, technology providers have convinced many organisations that they only need to purchase collaboration software to foster collaboration. There are many large organisations that have bought enterprise licences for products like IBM’s Collaboration Suite or Microsoft’s Solutions for Collaboration who are not getting good value for money, simply because people don’t know how to collaborate effectively or because their culture works against collaboration.Of course technology plays an important role in effective collaboration. We are not anti-technology. Rather we want to help redress the balance and shift the emphasis from merely thinking about collaboration technology to thinking about collaboration skills, practices, technology and supporting culture. Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.
This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.”
I think you’ll find this a very useful resource in this period of “Web 2.0 hype” by the leading technology vendors.
One of the things we have learnt from the development and use of the IDeA Community of Practice Platform is that a CoP can have different needs, dependent on the stage in their life cycle and their primary purpose. The role and importance of the facilitators (or moderators) in these communities cannot be overemphasised since they must ensure that the needs of the CoP are understood in order to create the appropriate environment for achieving their CoP’s goals and objectives.
The following table identifies various needs of a CoP, dependent on its primary purpose. A CoP could go through all of these various categories of need during its life-cycle. Successful facilitators will be in tune with the changing needs of their CoPs, and will provide the required support and facilities to meet these needs.
How does a facilitator know what his/her community needs at any particular point in time? Through continual engagement with community members and regular member surveys.
COMMUNITY NEEDS
Helping needs
Where members help each other to solve day-to-day issues and experts can be invited in to help.
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Best practice needs
Where developing and disseminating best practice, guidelines and procedures issued to provide instant access to validated and up to date knowledge and information. |
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- increasing exchange of lessons learnt and good practice
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- seeking new understanding of developments and implementations
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- creating a forum to support requests for help and assistance
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- collaborating to develop, consult and validate practice
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- creating an environment to share, assess value and disseminate good ideas
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- publishing and disseminating specific practices
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- creating self-help functions
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- verifying effectiveness and benefit of practice
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- accelerating collaboration across organisations or a specialism
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- accelerating the speed of quality decision making and implementation of best practice
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- strengthening networks and improving employee relations
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- Achieve higher standards in projects, strategies and improving outcomes
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- facilitating professional peer learning and drawing from expert knowledge and experience
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- enlisting leading experts
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Knowledge Stewarding needs
Where there is a need to organise, manage and steward a body of knowledge from which members can draw. |
Innovation needs
Where the creation of breakthrough ideas, knowledge and practices is paramount |
- creating a shared understanding of issues
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- creating a safe and trusted environment where innovation can take place
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- providing instant access to knowledge and information in an organised and intuitive way
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- supporting creative, experimental, multi-disciplinary and cross boundary working
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- accessing collective and vetted knowledge that is managed, summarised and up to date
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- sharing and developing expert knowledge and thinking
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- bring together timely and relevant knowledge and information
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- developing innovative practices
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- providing quick and easy access to up to date news, publications, websites and practice in one place
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- accelerating the rate of innovation through sharing and testing out ideas
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- increasing opportunities for self-help and personal development
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- providing opportunities to approach and work with new technologies, new business and new approaches
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- collaborating to increase the productivity of ideas and knowledge
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- providing channels to support the development of new ideas and ways of working
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- helping with leadership issues
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- sharing warnings and deciphering trends
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David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society has posted some additional comment on the Community of Practice Facilitators Workshop. My thanks to David for his probing questions and insightful comment.
We had a very good day at the IDeA Community of Practice Facilitator’s Workshop on Friday 11th April. These are regular (bi-annual) events where we get the CoP facilitators (and several guests) together to share knowledge and experience of facilitating one or more of the 300+ CoPs now active across local government.
The day was organised and facilitated by a team from the IDeA, led by Michael Norton, who interestingly enough has just put his toe in the water and started his own blog. I’m sure he’ll have lots of valuable things to say about his specialist area – knowledge management.
Socialreporter David Wilcox was there with an eye on proceedings and video camera at the ready. David did a video interview with Michael Norton and me, but not quite sure where this will appear (note – since posted here). David is also trialling video streaming using QIK and his new S60 Nokia so we’ll look out for some instant video commentary next time!
One of the key themes for the day was how to make a CoP fly. We used the analogy of the CoP being a hot air balloon, and the need to ensure it could gain sufficient height to cross a mountain range. The injections of hot air being the various activities that a facilitator could take to keep the CoP flying. There’s a useful article over at Knowledge Board about this.
We also had a video from Nancy White, who has been chairing a hotseat in the Facilitators CoP for the past two weeks on the topic: Are our assumptions about sustaining groups online out of date in the network era?
My personal interest was in listening to the stories ‘from the coal face’, i.e. the experiences of the various facilitators. I have a role as technical steward for the CoP platform, so I want to make sure that the technology is meeting the needs of the facilitators and ordinary members, and that future developments are keeping pace with how the platform is being used. I briefly covered what was being planned for next phase of development, and fortunately the new features seemed to be consistent with what users were asking for. However, I was a bit surprised at how some people were using blogs – not as I had anticipated in that they would be associated with personal comment and promotion on what is happening in a CoP, but in some cases as the vehicle for collecting and distributing confidential CoP comments and documents to just the members of the private CoP. My plans for changing the blog facility from being just internal to each CoP to more of a platform-wide facility to encourage more inter-CoP communication and collaboration may have to be reviewed – though I still think this is a valid need.
Overall it was a very successful day, with lots of useful tips interchanged on how to keep that CoP flying. The benefit of all these type of events is the realisation that you have colleagues out there facing similar issues to you, and can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of a growing cohort of facilitators.
There were a few quotes I will remember:
“I’m not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation”
I’d like to think that CoPs do empower people to make change, but the heavy hand of command and control is still evident in many organisations, and could in some cases snuff out that spark of innovation that is in all of us.
“Someone read and commented on my first blog! I got a real buzz out of that – it’s not an ego trip or anything, I’m just so pleased that someone thought I had something interesting to say”
Yes, let’s have more of that!
“We’re all learning together; IDeA does not have all the answers – it’s up to us to help each other”
On that note, I went away feeling quite happy with life!
With a background in both Information Management (IM) and Knowledge Management (KM) disciplines, I’m often asked how they relate to each other, and what we actually mean by “IM” and “KM”.
Providing text book definitions does not help, because even these are clouded by jargon and tend to be verbose. I’ve therefore tried to construct a very simple definition for both IM and KM which also infers the relationship between them, as follows:
Information Management: The structure, organisation, classification and life-cycle management of codified knowledge.
Knowledge Management: Accessing, sharing and ’sense making’ of codified and tacit information.
If anyone can do better (in terms of simplicity and accuracy), please do let me know.
I attended an “Enterprise 2.0″ event last week where Ian Lloyd gave a very thought provoking presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on accessibility. Ian is a web developer working for the Nationwide Building Society, and clearly knows his stuff when it comes to designing websites that will accommodate assistive technologies – such as screen readers, voice to text and screen magnifiers.
This was particularly relevant to the work I’m presently doing in building on-line environments for support of Communities of Practice in the public sector, where accessibility standards and guidelines for websites is far more rigorously enforced than in the private sector. Conforming to standards such as W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is a given, but websites must also conform to guidance such as Delivering Inclusive Websites, issued by the COI.
Personally, I have some sympathy with developers of ’social media-rich’ websites (which I’ll categorise as being ‘Web 2.0′) in that it’s quite difficult to find the right balance between accessibility and making the site appealing to a mass audience. Clearly Facebook comes to mind here. However, I’m not sure that vendors/developers do enough to ensure that they have catered for the disabled minority. For example, the Captcha processes used on a growing number of websites are fairly difficult to negotiate even for someone with 20:20 vision.
I don’t necessarily think that Social Media has to mean poor accessibility, yet there seems to be a sort of tacit acceptance that this is the case . I’m now far more aware of my obligations in striving to make the CoP platform available to a more diverse audience and will be taking steps to in the next development phase to ensure we’re meeting the required guidelines and best practice.
Two very useful resources for anyone interested in issues around accessibility and diversity are Abilitynet and the Shaw Trust.
