If there's one thing that the Web has taught us it's that the network gets smarter by virtue of people using it and product development is no exception. Not only do we have examples of great online applications and systems to point to and use for best practices, but the latest tools, frameworks, development platforms, APIs, widgets, and so on, which are largely developed today in the form of open source over the Internet, tend to accumulate many of these new best practices. I've lauded everything from frameworks like Rails, Cake PHP, and Grails to online community platforms like Drupal and Joomla as examples of guiding solutions that can be vital springboards for the next great Web product or service.
Evernote releases Google Notebook importer – Ars Technica – Google admitted it was no longer immune to the economic downturn last week by announcing that in addition to a handful of layoffs, certain services were either getting put on hold or shut down. Among these is Google Notebook, an Evernote-like product that allows users to easily clip information from around the web and organize it into, well, notebooks. Fortunately, Evernote got in touch to let us know that it is officially taking in Google Notebook refugees with a handy new Google Notebook importer.
Ourmedia: Homepage – We're here for the community
Video producers and podcasters use Ourmedia to show off their works and create communities of interest.
* Create your own channels!
* Learn how to create cooler media
* Grab rights-cleared footage & music
* Upload your work to multiple sites
* You own your media – no lock-ins!
e-Government National Awards 2008 – The Communities of Practice (CoPs) platform has won a 2008 National e-Government Award. e-Government National Awards winner 2008
The annual e-Government National Awards are the UK's highest level commendation for the best e-government services, recognising excellence across transformational e-government projects.
JanRain – Products – RPX – Today, organizations are spending an excessive amount of time learning about OpenID, installing and configuring Open Source libraries, customizing and integrating with existing infrastructure, and maintaining the latest features and capabilities of OpenID. With the comprehensive JanRain RPX solution, a software as a service platform, you can accelerate user registration and logins, learn more about your customers, and create a universal login experience across your websites.
I’ve was pleased to be invited to do a keynote presentation at the NHS eSpace Coordinators conference earlier this month. I wanted to emphasise the importance of the Coordinator’s role in building trust within a Community of Practice (CoP), and as a catalyst for turning conversations into active collaboration. I should note that I’m more familiar the term ‘Community Facilitator’, for this role, and have used the term ‘facilitator’ and ‘coordinator’ to mean the same thing, i.e. the person or people who support, manage and guide the CoP members in achieving their goals. Perhaps a better description for this role is ‘community cultivators’, since it is they who provide the conditions for the CoP to grow and flourish.
I can’t over-emphasise enough the importance of this role and the people who perform it. The difference between a vibrant and successful CoP and one that meanders aimlessly with little or no contributions is down to the facilitator (or coordinator, moderator, cultivator). Members of the CoP have been sufficiently motivated to join the CoP; it is up to the facilitator to inspire the members to connect, collaborate and co-create. I tip my hat to all of those who do this successfully, and quite often without due recognition or reward. Something I hope will change as more and more organisations are turning to this way of working and have realised that technology alone does not provide a successful learning and sharing environment.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is willing to share examples of how active facilitation (e.g. guided learning) has helped their CoP, and/or what makes a successful Facilitator.
The slides are available for download from Slideshare, and reproduced below:
49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats – As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.
Here is a look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.
Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace (IBM Report)
Communities and Collaboration – New blog post: Communities of Practice wins e-Gov National Award http://tinyurl.com/bhasbb
Winners in the e-Government National Awards are announced – e-Government excellence: Leadership & Professionalism
(Leading e-Government strategies and professional development which contribute to achieving positive transformation).
Winner Improvement & Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA)
Communities of Practice for Local Government
The IDeA Communities of Practice platform (CoPs) won first prize in its category at the National e-Government Awards in the prestigious setting of at the Guildhall, London on Tuesday 20th January. The e-Government awards are supported by the Cabinet Office, SOCITM and SOLACE, and recognise excellence in public sector IT and transformational e-Govt projects.
See also John’s IDeA Blog for photos of John Hayes, Michael Norton, Lawrence Hall and me picking up the award.
CoPs was short-listed as finalist in two categories, and won under ‘e-Government Excellence: Professionalism & Leadership’ (Leading e-Government strategies and professional development which contribute to achieving positive transformation).
There were 588 entrants to the e-government awards, with CoPs being one of only 11 winners receiving the UK’s highest level commendation for the best e-government and technology-driven services. It was also pleasing to hear Gordon Brown, in his recorded speech for the evening, reference the good work that online communities had been achieving for government over the previous year.
This is some recognition (at last!) for the work I’ve been engaged on at the IDeA for these past 3 year’s, ably supported by the Knowledge Management team, and not forgetting all of the many excellent community managers and facilitators who keep the communities buzzing.
The CoP platform currently supports over 26,000 registered users across the UK public sector, and more than 600 individual CoPs, collaborating on policy initiatives, developing good/next practice for public sector service improvement or just sharing knowledge and ideas.
There was a brief mention in Gordon Brown’s videolink speech about on-line communities. I’d like to thik he had the CoP platform in mind when he said it!
These are my links for January 18th through January 20th:
More Adults Than Ever on Social Networks – ReadWriteWeb – The share of adult internet users who are involved in social networking online has more than quadrupled in the past four years in the U.S. In 2005, only 8% of adults had a social network profile. As of December 2008, that number was 35%. What motivates those in older generations to go online? Is it the opportunity to professionally network with their colleagues? The answer may surprise you
I’m saddened to read that Google is discontinuing development of Google Notebook, something I’ve used extensively since it was launched. It seems that this is part of a general rationalisation exercise being conducted as part of the need to cut costs. Other Google services and applications being culled include Google Catalogs, Dodgeball (a mobile social network aquired by Google) and Mapshup Editor. Jaiku, the micro-blogging service acquired by Google will migrate to the Google App Engine and will no longer be actively developed.
I guess that none of this should come as any surprise since in these austere times most organisations are looking closely at the business models (or lack of them) which underpin their products and services. However, even loss-making services can serve a purpose if they are drawing users into other more profitable areas of an organisation’s business. I remember when I worked for Reuters that News was a loss making service but was packaged in such a way that revenue could be generated from the products it was packaged with, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. I can only hope that Google has thought this through and has assessed the impact that withdrawing these services will have on bringing users into the more profitable parts of their business, and their general desire to build interconnected social networks.
There is a lesson here for all of us who use freely available products and applications to support their digital lifestyle. For me, transferring all of my accumulated notebook content and tags to an alternative service will be a necessary and unwelcome activity over the coming weeks/months. It leads me to question whether I should have relied as much as I have done on Google’s applications to organise my various digital assets. Perhaps it is better to be in control of your own web server to organise and manage bookmarks, tags, and other digital resources. At least that way all I would have to worry about is keeping it all backed up. I’ll be doing some serious thinking about this in the near future, I suggest you do too!
These are my links for January 15th through January 18th:
Analytics Toolbox: 50+ More Ways to Track Website Traffic – If you have a website or blog you’re probably interested in who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing while they’re there. Way back in 2007 we did a post on web analytics but a lot has changed since then. Most analytics packages are now focusing on real-time tracking and graphical representations of visitor data. Here are more than fifty analytics tools to help you monitor and analyze your web traffic.
Communities and Collaboration – New blog post: Blogs vs. Wikis – the Kennedy, Nixon debate http://tinyurl.com/8mn8rg
100 top sites for the year ahead (2009) – The online world has changed dramatically even since we last drew up a list of 100 useful sites in December 2006. In the interim, there has been a revival of the browser wars – with Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari making surprising inroads into the Windows monopoly, and offering a new vision of what browsing can be like.
The growth of location-based services – particularly those which you can choose to log yourself in and out of, thus protecting your privacy – has been rapid.
Video, of course, is now everywhere. YouTube was already dominant in 2006, but now the BBC's iPlayer is taking over. If it makes its technology available to all, perhaps the UK will become a nation of video makers and watchers.
Posted on January 17, 2009 by Steve Dale in Blogs, Wiki, fun
Hat-tip to my colleague Michael Norton who told me about this video. I hadn’t associated blogs with Watergate until I saw this. Maybe there’s some truth in the notion that blog are on ‘the dark side’!
These are my links for January 14th from 08:50 to 09:25:
Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups – Most people think of Google Maps in terms of finding a place or business, or getting directions from one point to another. Others use the satellite images and terrain mapping features. But there are tons of other uses out there for Google maps.
Mobile Web Megatrends – Mobile Web Megatrends is a unique combination of international conferences, on-line education and an interactive community to shareinsights and opinions about the mobile web. We bring together some of t he leading thinkers and companies in this space
