These are my links for November 24th through November 27th:
- The Praized Blog » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 Communities: Trends & Technologies – 1. The Web is becoming more and more social.
2. The Web is becoming more and more local.
3. The Web is becoming more and more fragmented.
4. Mobile devices (smart phones, iPhone, etc.) and new devices (GPS, Kindle, wifi-enabled game consoles, etc.) means new place to display your content but new context as well.
5. The Web is becoming more structured (tags, micro-formats). More structure means better relevancy. Get ready for the semantic Web.
- The 5 P’s of Web Communities – When considering web communities as a way to reach out to your market, there are 5 key ways people will come together to form and uphold an online community. For memory’s sake, here are the five P words that illustrate the thriving online community market and what it can mean for small businesses.
- You Gotta Try Mr. Tweet – Last night I happened across Mr. Tweet, a stealth startup that’s growing quickly. The site bills itself as your “personal assistant for Twitter,” but it functions as a very interesting version of Facebook’s friend finder.
The site asks you for your Twitter username, and then processes your connections and the content of your tweets. I input my name this morning, and by late this afternoon, it DM’d me with my ready report.
- Supporting Pioneering Leaders as Communities of Practice – Do you ever stand back and try to see the big picture, the view from 50,000 feet of what's going on in organizations, communities, the world? From up there, how would you describe these times? Is it a time of increasing economic and political instability, of growing divisiveness and fear, of failing systems and dying dreams? Is it a time of new possibilities, of great examples of hope, of positive human evolution, of transformation? Are we succeeding in solving major problems, are we creating more? Is it any of these things, is it all of these things?
- Bulletins : Department of Health – Publications – Index of bulletins
Gartner has just published its latest ‘Magic Quadrant’ report for Social Software. If nothing else, it gives you a list of all the key vendors in this space, though you may personally disagree with where they are placed in the various quadrants. For example, Microsoft is considered to have more completeness of vision and greater ability to execute than Google. Maybe Gartner analysts haven’t been speaking to anyone struggling to implement MOSS 2007!
The definition of the market they are covering in this reports is:
Market Definition/Description
We view this market as consisting of products that focus on team collaboration, communities and social interaction. The buyers in this market are looking for persistent virtual environments, in which participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other. They are deployed internally among employees or contractors as well as externally for partners, customers, prospects or other stakeholders. The business uses of these products vary in terms of degree of formality and openness — from team information sharing and project coordination among a small, homogeneous group within an enterprise; to sharing best practices within a business unit; to encouraging socialization and knowledge transfer among employees or even external participants in a partner or customer network.
In general terms, products that compete in this market, help users to:
- Find out about each other.
- Form teams, communities or informal groups.
- Work together on the same work objects.
- Discuss and comment on their work.
- Organize work from their perspective.
- Identify relevant work.
- Discover other people with common interests.
- Learn from others’ expertise.
Some specific uses of products in this market include:
- Sharing team information and coordinating project-related activities by adding permanence and structure to ad hoc communications.
- Empowering communities of experts and interested parties (bonding people by specific interests, capturing best practices, disseminating lead-user innovation and providing an informal support network).
- Facilitating social interaction by helping people to establish and strengthen personal relationships, develop trust and, in the end, to reduce friction and accelerate the business processes that people are engaged in.
- Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of action when decisions need to be made.
We adjusted the name of this market from “Team Collaboration and Social Software” to just “Social Software” (see “Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007″) in order to:
- Simplify it, as social interaction support implies team collaboration support.
- To recognize the provision of social interaction support as one of the most important sources of differentiation among the products from established and new vendors.
- To take into account the addition of blogs and wikis in the minimum functionality for inclusion (see below).
The products available in this market are generally deployed internally and managed by IT departments or service partners, although an increasing number of vendors make their products available via SaaS and, in some cases, as managed appliances.
I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions from the report, but for me, it doesn’t look like a completely unbiassed and objective assessment of the social computing environment.
These are my links for November 19th through November 24th:
- BarCamp / BarcampUKGovweb09 – If you think you've got something to contribute to improving how government organisations use the web, then this event is for you. There's a Google Group that was set up for last year's event where you can find out more.
Sign up further down this page, and be prepared to lead a session on something.
* What did you build in the last year that you're most proud of?
* What didn't quite come off as you'd hoped this year? – and even better, why didn't it work?
* What's the coolest thing you're working on at the moment?
* What's the tool or technique you can't believe we aren't all using?
- Mobiles in-a-Box – Tools and tactics for mobile advocacy
Mobiles in-a-box from the Tactical Technology Collective is a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides and case studies designed to help advocacy and activist organisations use mobile technology in their work.
Mobiles in-a-box is designed to inspire you, to present possibilities for the use of mobile telephony in your work and to introduce you to some tools which may help you. After reading the material in this toolkit you can expect to be able to design and implement a mobile advocacy strategy for your organisation.
- Tag Gardening for Folksonomy Enrichment and Maintenance – s social tagging applications continuously gain in popularity, it becomes more and more accepted that models and tools for (re-)organizing tags are needed. Some first approaches are already practically implemented. Recently, activities to edit and organize tags have been described as "tag gardening". We discuss different ways to subsequently revise and reedit tags and thus introduce different "gardening activities"; among them models that allow gradually adding semantic structures to folksonomies and/or that combine them with more complex forms of knowledge organization systems. Moreover, power tags are introduced as tag gardening candidates and the personal tag repository TagCare is presented.
- The AppGap » » Enterprise 2.0 — an adoption model – Web apps for work; reviews + commentary; Work 2.0, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 – What are the factors to be mindful of when evolving into an Enterprise 2.0 or even Government 2.0 organisation? Part of the difficulty is understanding the balance between the use of these tools by individuals in a personal and social context and by the organisation as part of its enterprise architectural planning and strategic.
- onlinefacilitation – Online Facilitation Tips, Pointers and Resources
This wiki is a resource collection place for Nancy White, Full Circle Associates and an adjunct to the Online Facilitation list on Yahoogroups, founded in August 1999. Consider it a general playground around online facilitation and online community work. When I can, I will do client work here openly that may be useful to others. Consider it a shared resource. Feel free to add other categories.
Web 2.0 is opening up new opportunities for local and central government to provide more citizen-centric services using cost effective technologies. Innovation in the private sector is making Web 2.0 tools easier to use and cheaper to deploy. Social networking and use of social media tools is fast becoming ubiquitous; the question that most councils now face is when rather than if to embrace Web 2.0 facilities. How and why should local authorities be planning to exploit the collaborative features of Web 2.0 technologies? Feature for IT Adviser Magazine.
These are my links for November 16th through November 17th:
- GoingOn Home – GoingOn provides the most comprehensive ondemand solution for building interactive web communities. We are dedicated to helping our customers to transform their web presence from a static site to a vibrant community of employees, suppliers, partners and customers. The result is improved customer acquisition, higher productivity and increased revenues.
- OpenACS Home – OpenACS is a toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. OpenACS is the foundation for many products and websites, including the .LRN (pronounced "dot learn") e-learning platform.
OpenACS is open source and is available under the GNU General Public License.
- Online Information – Home (CrowdVine) – Welcome to the social networking site for Online Information. Use this network to find and connect with people at the conference.
- Using Social Media To Create Social Media Training – Social Media Training – This site explores social media training and provides a resource for those looking to evangelize social media in their organizations.
What should a 'Social Media 101' course cover? What tools should people be aware of? How should we use those tools? What are the pitfalls? What are the basics that everyone in your marketing/communications department should know?
In the spirit of social media, there's no better way to develop a curriculum for social media training than through a wiki. Let the collaboration begin!
- Web 2.0 Stories and Community | BUZZ3R – Never read a twiller? Having twissues with your twerminology? Welcome, then, to the unforgivable abuse of the English language that some call Twitterspeak.
The trick, in most instances, is to take the first two letters of microblogging service Twitter and meld them, often unwillingly, to the front of your chosen word. These ungainly neologisms are so numerous that they now require at least two sites to track them: Twictionary and Twittonary.
- CollectiveX – Create a Groupsite for Work, Life, Anything – Free Social Collaboration & Networking for Groups.
These are my links for November 13th through November 14th:
These are my links for November 9th through November 12th:
- The TALK Project – TALK – TALK is a wiki for the public sector in the UK and beyond. It started out as a Communities and Local Government project to try and help people in the local government sector work together more effectively. What began as a project to carry out research into the National Projects has morphed into an effort to provide people in local government with spaces where they can work together.
- CommunityIntelligence Ltd. – We facilitate transformation that strengthens authentic connection between people
to realize the next level of collective potential.
- How the children of the digital age will change the way we work | Money | The Guardian – They helped propel Barack Obama into power – and now the children of the digital age are about to change the way we work. Don Tapscott explains why the rest of us need to shape up.
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott is published by McGraw-Hill Professional
- e-Government National Awards – 68 finalists from among the 588 nominations have been announced in the e-Government National Awards 2008 – this year's 'best of the best' in public sector ICT & e-Government.
- Bringing Micro-messaging to Enterprise 2.0 – Qik.com – The huge success of Twitter has triggered a number of firms (e.g., QikCom, Yammer, and Present.ly) that now provide micro-messaging for use behind the firewall. This is yet another example of a personal web 2.0 tool creating a market for an enterprise 2.0 version.
The Improvement and Development Agency’s (IDeA) Communities of Practice for Local Government (CoPs) has been shortlisted for two awards at the e-Government National Awards 2008, this years ‘best of the best’ in public sector ICT and e-government. The winners will be announced at the National Awards dinner on 20th January 2009.
The two categories that the IDeA CoP’s have been shortlisted for are:
- e-Government excellence: Leadership & Profession
- e-Government excellence: Innovation in Strategy on a National Level
The local government CoP strategy was conceived in 2005 in order to support more effective collaborative working across the sector and as an incubator for service improvements and innovation. The CoP platform was ultimately launched in December 2007. Since then, over 19,000 public sector staff have registered on the platform and there are currently over 550 active CoP’s, working on a whole range of activities, from policy development, children’s services and health to leadership and knowledge management.
For me, this is the culmination of 3 years work in getting the strategy implemented. But it doesn’t stop here. New technology and products (Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0) are making it far easier to connect with experts and peers and providing enormous opportunities for co-creation and personal development. What was started 3 years ago is just the foundation for change and improvement across the whole public sector. Planning for the next 3 years has already started!
There is more background to the IDeA CoPs in the attached pdf.
Communities of Service
These are my links for November 5th through November 9th:
- InternetNews Realtime IT News – Better Social Networking From… Intel? – In his demo, Otellini showed a prototype social networking system that could help a new employee get oriented in their new position. For instance, the display could show a diagram of connections between the user — represented by their image — to their colleagues images and profiles. It would also present links to wikis for finding expertise relevant to the team she'll be working with.
- CoP Benchmarking – In Phase I, the Knowledge and Innovation Network at Warwick Business School collaborated with some of the world’s leading organisations to benchmark their networks and communities of practice against other organisation and sectors.
The results of the Phase I benchmarking excercise are published in a series of reports entitled
'Communities of Practice (CoP) Benchmarking Report: Using CoPs to improve Individual and organisational performance':
• Summary Findings (PDF Document)
• Full Report (available on request)
• Guidelines for Good Practice (available on request)
- Are we really collaborating? :: Blog :: Headshift – Collaboration' is being used pretty loosely these days and often in the same breath as enterprise 2.0. But, simply because people work together to meet objectives and reach goals, doesn't mean they are collaborating. Other 'c' words like communicating, co-operating or co-ordinating may be more appropriate descriptions of what is actually taking place.
- BarcampUKGovweb – Sustainable Community Action – Event wiki for the BarcampUKGoveweb event that was held 26th January 2008
- Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions – By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or unexpected ways, according to Gartner.
Gartner points out that the benefits of social computing — when accrued — will rarely occur in the context of government-driven initiatives. For example, governments’ desire to retain ownership and control of the network, through restrictive participation policies, will be detriment to magnetism.
I thought I would post a couple of examples of how communities of practice (CoPs) are becoming increasingly mainstream in developing policy and seeding innovation in the public sector – an area of work I continue to support through my involvement with the Improvement and Develpment Agency.
News from the Cabinet Office on how the Social Exclusion Task Force has set up a Socially Excluded Adults Community of Practice as a spin off from work that the IDeA have been doing to support councils to help people with learning disabilities into employment. The CoP was announced by Kevin Brennan, Minister for Social Exclusion at the Children and Adults conference last week.
And as an example of how to bring fresh and dynamic perspectives into a CoP, Paul Barber will be holding a live ‘hotseat’ forum session in the Beacon Scheme CoP on 12 November 2008 11am – 12noon. Paul may be better known for his appearances in TV series such as Only Fools and Horses, and the film The Full Monty. Paul has recently launched the paper back version of his book, ‘Foster Kid‘, and will be in the forum to discuss the book and issues it raises about children and young people in care.
These are just two of the 550+ CoPs that are currently being supported on the IDeA’s CoP platform.
