These are my links for October 29th through October 31st:
- 7 Facebook apps for Enterprise 2.0 | digiculturetravelexpatasia - Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) works by leveraging blogs, online video, social networking, micro blogging and social bookmarking, aka social media. Social media happens to be dirt cheap when compared to traditional and mainstream advertising and PR campaigns.
Facebook is where the cool kids are today and by the looks of things that’s where many companies are also trying to maximize their ad dollars.
eMarketer today came out with the report, Retailers Get Social with Facebook
- Report on how Web 2.0 technologies can lessen impact of aging work force - In the study, “Web 2.0—The Inflection Point for Knowledge Management,” Manufacturing Insights said that demographic realities and the emergence of commercially viable Web 2.0 technologies will make future knowledge management efforts more likely to succeed than previous ones.
- Patient Opinion | Home - # Tell people what happened
# See what others are saying
# Find out how patients are changing the NHS
- Innovation Catalyst | The Young Foundation - The Innovation Catalyst is a partnership with the Innovation Unit, supported and funded by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and working in conjunction with Essex, Knowsley, Sheffield and Westminster Local Authorities. Initially funded until March 2009, this first year is a development phase for the future work of the Catalyst.
- andrewlewin: let me think about that … - Public Sector Online 2008 conference, 28 October 2008. Summary of the sessions.
- http://www.mywebspiration.com/ - Collaborative mind-mapping application
As of today, new features and a new look for the IDeA Communities of Practice (CoP) platform. This is the first major new release for over 12 months, and brings a number of usability enhancements to the platform, which is provided as a free resource to staff working on local government throughout the UK.
New features include:
- a more compact and cleaner design for the Welcome page which now includes: (i) service and general information announcements, (ii)details of most active communities and (iii) details of new communities, (iii) details of featured/special communities.
- a “tag cloud” for quickly finding content and communities by keyword.
- the MyHome page has been changed from green to blue to ensure consistency with any personalised content pages (My Profile My Blogs, My Alerts, My Messages, My Contacts etc.)
- finding an existing Community of Practice has been made simpler by the addition of an A-Z index and tag cloud to the ‘Communities’ webpage.
- the Help facilities have been improved to ensure users can make the most of all the various features on the website.
- a new on-line process for setting-up communities enabling faster turnaround.
- the addition of ‘themes’ for Forum threads and Library files, enabling a blended approach between taxonomy and tags for organising content
- the Forum section now allows for ‘sticky’ discussion threads, where a topic can be marked to remain at or near the top of the list of topics.
- a facility for closing threads, for example where a discussion must be time-limited.
This release is the first of 3 major upgrades being planned between now and early 2009. Watch this space for further announcements, or better still, go the the CoP platform and start connecting, collaborating and innovating!
Background
The community of practice platform was launched in December 2007 as part of an initiative to encourage collaboration and more effective knowledge sharing between local councils. The anticipated benefits which are now being realise are better/more efficient public services and greater opportunities for innovation and co-production. It currently supports over 18,000 users and more than 550 separate online communities, working on a range of initiatives from climate change to preventing violent extremism. The platform supports a range of social networking and social media tools.
[Steve Dale is the business analyst and technical lead for the IDeA CoP Platform]
These are my links for October 26th 2008
A number or reports and one consultation document on the topic of Digital Inclusion were published on Friday 24th October 2008 by the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG).
There is also a discussion forum to discuss the main themes of the Digital Inclusion Action Plan.
Links are on the CLG website but replicated here for convenience:
I’m enouraged by the recent blog from John Hayes (Director of Services at the IDeA) regarding the LGA Group Development Strategy. John recognises the increasingly important role of local government Communities of Practice (CoPs) in sharing knowledge and identifying good/best practice based on evidence-based outcomes. As John says:
The Local Government Association Group Development Strategy is forcing everyone in the LGA Group to think hard about how we help Councils. One Strategy concept which is central to our thinking at the IDeA is “experience to advocacy”. Advocacy is fundamentally about getting a better deal from the stakeholders, in particular Government, who impact local government’s ability to operate. Advocacy is more powerful if it is informed directly by the experience of Councils.
(….)
We are (…) simplifying the approach to engagement. From the IDeA’s point of view this has involved boiling down the description of “what we do” to three core activities:
- Practice development – working with practitioners to develop best and next practice;
- Practice challenge – getting those practitioners to challenge each others performance using that best and next practice;
- Practice support – where councils are struggling with practice finding practitioners who are willing to help them.
Perhaps the key unifying theme is the approach to experience or knowledge. All the work involves working with practitioners (politicians and staff). Building on the IDeA communities of practice approach we can now be much more ambitious about how we engage with practitioners to share experience which can then be used in real time to inform advocacy.
As regular readers of my blog will know, I’ve been behind the CoP initiative from the word go (well actually, even before the word go!) and am currently providing business process and technical stewardship for the IDeA CoP Platform, which has grown from nothing to support almost 18,000 public sector users and 550 CoPs in less than two years. More about this in my next blog where I will be describing some of the new features of the platform that will shortly be released.
I’m not really into this relentless trend to categorise people and their behaviours into socio-economic-demographic groups since very rarely does anyone neatly fit within one of these categories. However, I follow the trend if for no other reason I can speak the same language as my peers. So, having got to grips with the various attributes and behaviours symbolised as ‘Generation X‘ and ‘Generation Y‘ , it seems we need to recognise another category - ‘Generation V’. (Since we seem to be going through the alphabet in reverse order, I can only assume I’ve somehow missed who ‘Generation W’ is or was!)
A recent Gartner report categorises ‘ Generation Virtual’ (Generation V) as a new online group that is not defined by age, gender, social class or geography. Instead, it is based on achievement, accomplishments and an increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights.
Within the Generation V community, Gartner defines four levels of engagement - creators, contributors, opportunists, and lurkers - related to the extent to which customers engage with other customers and the level of engagement that businesses and other organizations must have to enable them. This graphic pulled from the report explains:
Levels of virtual engagement
Creator: “I want to own this.”
- Establish a community
- Create blog / podcast
- Upload video content
Contributor: “I want to be part of this.”
- Review a product
- Answer a question
- Contribute to the community
Opportunist: “Since I’m here…”
- Provide purchase feedback
- Vote
- Ask a question
- Forward to others
Lurker: “I’ll reap the rewards.”
- Click, transact
- Read product reviews
- Read blog / message boards
I shouldn’t be over-critical of the Gartner report or the conclusions they reach, since it’s certainly useful to recognise there are different levels of engagement in any social network or virtual community. However, I have two points to make:
- The ‘Creator’ falls tantalisingly into the seemingly well-established ‘1 % rule‘. In my experience, this is only true for social networks or unmentored/unfacilitated Communities of Practice (CoPs), where members or users are entirely self-directed. Based on the evidence I’ve seen in the IDeA CoP platform (550 communities), facilitated communities can have as much as 40% Creators (i.e. creating original content).
- I hate the term ‘Lurkers’ and refuse to use it in any dialogue I’m having about social networking or communities of practice. It seems to infer some sort of socially unacceptable behaviour and misses the point that these people are getting some value from the network or community. So - Gartner and anyone else who wishes to continue categorising behaviour, can we drop the term ‘Lurkers’ and call these people ‘Spectators’, which is a more socially accepted term, and infers these people are gaining something from the experience.
Anyway, and on reflection, as a 50-something year old, I guess I might prefer being categorised as Generation V as opposed a Baby Boomer!
Weighing scales
As part of my work at IDeA in developing their comminities of practice (CoP) strategy, we’re engaging with Warwick Business School and their Knowledge and Innovation Network affiliate in research project for ‘value’ benchmarking CoPs in public and private sectors. A launch event for this project took place on 18th September, with speakers including Larry Prusak and Dr Richard McDermott. The output from this event, including presentations and audio/MP3 files can be found on the WBS website.
Anyone interested in registering for Phase 2 of the project can register here.
Some reflections on my experience at the Exploiting Knowledge and Information symposium held at Cranfield University on 1-2 October 2008. The event was sponsored by the UK Government’s Knowledge Council.
Given this was an event for senior civil servants I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised by the fact that most speakers spent a good proportion of their time explaining how important they were, what power they wield and what governance structures they had set up/were responsible for. As a freelance consultant I wasn’t intimidated by this show of raw power and influence, but a quick glance around revealed a few awe-inspired faces.
All of the presentations were on PowerPoint, most were pure text (some you could even read!) and nearly all used a 2 x 2 grid to explain information/knowledge management (have Microsoft been pushing a new ‘must-have’ ppt design template?). A notable exception was Cabinet Office social media web guru William Perrins’ presentation on The Power of Information, which took us on a quick tour of various website mashups.
I also noted as general point that the phrases ‘knowledge management‘ and ‘information management‘ were referenced quite freely and interchangeably, almost as if they were the same thing. Fortunately that didn’t confuse me, but clearly it did for some as I overheard a fiew heated debates during the lunch break (for some, KM means the storage, organisation and dissemination of information…mmmm!)
I woke up later in the day when Professor Jane McKenzie from Henley Management School talked about “Developing Knowledge Professionals with different ways of thinking“. Amen to that, I thought.
I then pondered whether I (as a self-proclaimed Knowledge Professional) had a different way of thinking. I hoped I had, on the evidence I’d seen so far. I checked out the bios of the speakers, and noticed that everyone had proclaimed their achievements and their importance (importance = power) whereas my bio (included in the delegate pack because I was presenting a session in the afternoon) was about my beliefs. Sufficiently different thinking? Not sure.
So, I came away with a few observations on effective knowledge sharing and some thoughts for aspiring ‘Knowledge Professionals’:
- Hide the ego. You don’t need position or power to be heard. If you have something interesting to say, most people will listen.
- Knowledge is fluid, relevant and dynamic. It can’t be captured in a box.
- Knowledge is gained from experience.
- A document/information repository is where knowledge goes to die.
- Encoded knowledge becomes ‘information’; Information is not knowledge; information + context + sensemaking can support the development of knowledge.
- Conversations bring knowledge alive.
- Giving information some structure (e.g. metadata) and making it accessible will make it easier for people to find and use that information to support knowledge development.
And for all those still debating the dichotomy between ‘knowledge‘ and ‘information‘, a simple illustration of the difference:-
If I wanted to drive from Liverpool St station to Earls Court, I would use a map, or some written/printed instructions or maybe a SatNav device. All instances of ‘information‘.
If I took a taxi from Liverpool St Station to Earls Court, I’m relying on the ‘knowledge‘ of the taxi driver. The driver would know which roads to avoid at certain times of the day and which alternative routes to use if there is unexpected congestion. He/she may not ultimately be taking the shortest route, but it is likely to be the quickest route because he/she will want to drop me off and pick up a new fare as soon as possible. This is ‘tacit knowledge‘ in action, and like all knowledge it is very difficult to capture and make it explicit - hence why we trust taxi drivers to get us from A to B over and above our navigation skills. No matter how hard I studied maps and directions (information), I would never gain the taxi driver’s knowledge.
On a final point, I came across an excellent blog from Dave Pollard on the topic of empowerment, and with specific reference to the Art of Hosting. Well worth reading the whole blog, but I picked out the following abstract to reinforce my message about what makes a good Knowledge Professional:
- a thirst for truth, and an insistence on speaking the truth and being honest to a fault
- extraordinary perceptiveness, attentiveness, and presence
- intellectual and emotional sensitivity
- an almost erotic level of passion and energy
- total dedication to their chosen practices, pursued as lifelong practices, through which they seek only to get better (i.e. no expectation of mastery)
- great instincts
- wonderful improvisational skills
- a love of aesthetics, and not inconsiderable artistic and creative talent (my sketchbook yesterday was my struggle to keep up, as they all seem to be able to draw brilliantly)
- a high level of self-confidence, but never arrogance (in fact, humility)
- a desire to be of use and service to others, and the courage to do that anytime, anywhere (though when I asked them they said it was the only thing they could conceive of doing that would have meaning for them, so it wasn’t courageous at all)
- exceptional communication skills — oral, written, and non-verbal
- delightful imaginations
- great trust and respect for each other and for others who are, like them, dedicated to unselfish pursuits
- an aversion to power, and the use of power, and aversion to hierarchy and the cult of leadership
- great intelligence, knowledge and curiosity
- a subtle and gentle sense of humour, sometimes self-deprecating, never cruel or demeaning of others
A mantra for all aspiring Knowledge Professionals maybe?