These are my links for April 8th through April 13th:
♪♪ TweetyHall ♪♪ – Ever wanted a easy and effective way of getting involved in local politics and hearing what’s going on? Well here’s you chance! How? Follow and tweet your local politicians and prospective candidates, and use the power of Twitter to track local politics, make your voice heard and conversations more open.
Library clips :: Spidergram to visualise community orientation, adoption, and requests :: April :: 2009 – In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. By looking at orientations, we posit, you are in a better position to understand how to support them with tools and processes. They give you a lens to reflect on how your community is doing and where you might want it to be headed.
The 45 Social by Social Propositions – A set of principles and guidelines which we believe underpin the most successful ‘social by social’ projects.
10 Awesome Ways to Integrate Twitter With Your Website – Nettuts+ – There's no better time to start utilizing Twitter integration tools than right now. Here are 10 of the most useful ways to start turning your site readers (or your client's customer base) into Twitter followers, and vice versa.
Another ‘plain English’ video to from Lee Lefever in his inimitable style making complex subjects easy to understand for the layperson. This one gives a short explanation of what makes the World Wide Web work: browsers, packets, servers and links.
Encyclopedia of Life – The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge. The entry-point for each site is a species page suitable for the general public, but with several linked pages aimed at more specialized users. The sites sparkle with text and images that are enticing to everyone, as well as providing deep links to specific data.
eGovernment Resource Centre – The eGovernment Resource Centre is the Victorian Government's repository of eGovernment initiatives and international research. This site provides access to Victorian Government eGovernment strategies, policies, website standards, information and communications technology (ICT) and government website best practices. It is a dynamic site which aims to help us all learn from each other and continue to be pace setters in using new technologies to deliver easier government services to our citizens.
Communities and Collaboration – New blog post: Bookmarks for March 31st through April 5th http://steve-dale.net/2009/04/05/bookmarks-for-march-31st-through-april-5th/
Communities and Collaboration – New blog post: EDRM and Web 2.0 – where two worlds collide. http://steve-dale.net/2009/04/05/edrm-and-web-20-where-two-worlds-collide/
When Knowledge Management Hurts – Freek Vermeulen – HarvardBusiness.org – Over the last decade or so companies have been told ad nauseum that their knowledge is their ultimate (if not only) source of competitive advantage. They have been encouraged – by management gurus, academics, and ample management consultants alike – that they should invest in knowledge development, protect it, and make sure it gets identified, codified, and even put on the balance sheet.The advice was to carefully identify best practices and make sure that companies have systems that help the sharing of these practices throughout the organization.
Social Media Classroom: New Web 2.0 Platform for Education – ReadWriteWeb – The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.
OpenCalais – Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application
Possibly at a slight tangent to the collaboration and knowledge management memes that I normally write about, and no doubt exposing my roots in Information Management, I’ve been doing some research into the potential dichotomies between the highly structured and organised world of document and records management, and the relatively unstructured (some might almost say ‘anarchic’) world of Web 2.0. I’ve been particularly intrigued by how Information and Records Managers working for public sector organisations seem to be oblivious to the growing trend towards use of Facebook,Twitter, Flickr and Google Apps by staff who have become frustrated by the limitations of their Enterprise systems. And this in environments where effective data/information governance is essential for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements, i.e. central and local government.
Soon after embarking on this journey of enlightenment I realised that there were very few people who seemed to fully appreciate the impact and implications of data and information being created across multiple applications and repositories in organisations where there is public accountability. One notable exception is Steve Bailey, who’s book “Managing the Crowd: rethinking records management for the web 2.0 world“ became my main inspiration for developing my own thoughts on this issue, but I should also acknowledge my friend and colleague James Lappin, who I’ve turned to on more than one occasion for support and advice on some complex information management issue and from whom I’ve borrowed more than one idea in the following preamble I used for a recent presentation on this particular topic.
In the mid 1990’s records management simply transferred its paper practices over into the electronic world; building classification structures and folders into network drives or Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) systems.
Web 1.0 didn’t make any significant difference to EDRM strategies. Staff passively consumed websites, but they were still dependent for theor own work on the systems provided, policed and controlled by their organisations. Now Web 2.0 is here, colleagues can create, share and store information in any number of web-hosted applications: Google docs, blogs, wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook etc. The information is not held on the organisation’s servers. Web 2.0 is tilting the balance of power away from the organisation towards the individual.
There is a dichotomy between organisation-centric information management and user-centric information management, which is not being recognised or given sufficient priority by Records Managers. It will be interesting to see how future disclosure if information under the Freedom of Information Act will be addressed where significant parts of the ‘evidential record’ are distributed across different applications, many of which are outside the firewall, and many of which are potentially unknown to CIO’s.
I presented on this dichotomy between the structure and control as enforced through traditional electronic document and records managements systems (EDRMS) and the almost freeform environment of Web 2.0 at a recent Public Sector Forums event. Perhaps the title of the presentation is a little over-dramatic, but my intention was to evoke some interest and reaction from what appears to be a very laissez faire attitude to all this from Records Managers and other information management professionals. I don’t profess to have all the answers to the issues, but it might go some way to thinking about how these issues are going to be addressed if there was at least some recognition that current IM policies and standards are at best out of date and at worst, completely irrelevant in a Web 2.0 world. Perhaps this blog might at least raise some awareness!
