These are my links for August 20th through August 29th:
The Top 50 Social Media Blogs Of The Year – Trying to keep on top of the ever-changing world of social media? Whether you are a marketer, developer, technologist, industry insider, or simply a news lover, this is the list for you. We've put together the top 50 social media blogs for the year that you should check out. These bloggers will help you stay on top of the latest trends and will entertain you in the process. we selected the blogs by grouping them into different categories that our small business owners would find valuable.
IDeA: Communities of Practice | Social by Social – Communities of Practice for Local Government is a website that supports collaboration across local government and the public sector. It is an institutional initiative by the Improvement & Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA) centred on a specially developed web platform for user-generated content. It is a freely accessible resource that enables like-minded people to form online communities of practice using collaboration tools including blogs, wikis and social networks. It encourages knowledge-sharing and learning from each others’ experiences, and the fundamental aim is ‘helping conversations to happen’.
Social Graph: Concepts and Issues – Brad Fitzpatrick recently wrote an elegant and important post about the Social Graph, a term used by Facebook to describe their social network. In his post, Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". He went on to outline the problems with it, as well as a broad set of goals going forward.
One problem is that currently you need to have different logins for different social networks. Another issue is portability and ownership of an individual's information, explicitly and implicitly revealed while using social networks. As was recently asserted in the Social Bill Of Rights and as has been advocated for a while by Attention Trust Principles, users want to own their personal information – including their chunk of the Social Graph.
Local Government Engagement Online Research » Blog Archive » Now with pictures & other Twitterati lists!: @Liz_Azyan’s Twitterati Dedication List – People you should follow on Twitter – Over the past few months, I’ve become really great friends with my Twitterati’s . Who knew I’d find really great friends on Twitter, people who could be there for you when things don’t go quite right… – I’ve met most of the people on this list in real life. There are a few people that have always given me support throughout the months I’ve been on Twitter and feel that I’d like to dedicate this post to them as a way of saying TQ so much for all your support on my research and blog! Please forgive me if I have forgotten someone (pls give me a pinch if I’ve forgotten!).
SemanticWeb – Semantic Web Apps to Watch – This summer the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)published an article entitled "Exploiting Linked Data to Build Web Applications." That led us at Semanticweb.com to ponder, as the web of linked data grows, what are people doing with it? Here are some things we found out
I am very pleased to have been invited to speak at the Public Health Information Network (PHIN) conference in Atlanta, Georgia, taking place between 30th August and 3rd September. This will be my second visit to Atlanta, having been there in May this year to meet with staff at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) to share knowledge about the UK local government Communities of Practice, a strategy I developed for the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) in 2005 and which continues to thrive with over 35,000 users at the last count.
PHIN/CDC are in the process of developing collaboration tools to support geographically dispersed professionals working in the field of public health informatics, and Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a key part of this strategy. This is the primary reason I’ve been asked to attend, and I’ll be talking about the lessons we’ve learnt in developing the CoP Platform for local government. The focus of my presentation will be on the issues around measuring value of social networks and Communities of Practice. I think this will fit in quite well with the goals and objectives of the conference, repeated here:
Goal To build a public health informatics community through the sharing of promising practices and lessons learned.
Objectives
Extend the reach of innovative public health informatics practices.
Summarize current issues and trends in the field of public health informatics.
Translate issues and opportunities in public health informatics and health information technology for public health practitioners and policy makers.
Facilitate the development of a community focused on accelerating the field of public health informatics.
Validate public health informatics activities at national, state and local levels through open source collaboration and community building.
Integrate knowledge gained to leverage resources for sustainability of information technology, workforce development, and human capital.
A full programme of the conference is available online if anyone is interested. I’m speaking on the last day of the main conference, Wednesday 2nd September. I will make my slides available on Slideshare after the conference, and (access to Internet permitting) will provide regular Tweets on any the issues.
Understanding how to initiate change is becoming a central issue for our time. Fortunately nature has given us a model that has a much better chance of working than all the change book’s ideas so far.
CPsquare – We are a diverse community of practitioners that has gathered to share knowledge and build a practice around our passion for and belief in the potential of communities of practice as a vehicle for positive organizational and world change.
CPsquare is like a town square, a place where people gather to connect and learn together. We are from corporate, private, non-profit, and academic organizations; we hail from many nations across the globe; we are involved in consulting, research, and direct support of communities of practice; and we join together to create our own community of practice. We are a non-profit organization, registered as a 501(c)(6) organization in the US.
ProjectPier.org – ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting. Even better, it will always be free.
Anecdote: The co-evolution of technology and organising – The technology we use changes the way we organise and the way we organise effects the technologies we use. This hand-in-glove interaction is called co-evolution. Take the example of the invention of the spinning frame during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The spinning frame made possible large scale cloth production and created the need for factories, which in turn affected how water and steam were used to drive machinery in those factories.1
Are we seeing a similar co-evolution between information dissemination technology and how knowledge programs are organised? The two killer apps for the PC have been the word processor and the spreadsheet. With these two tools we were able to create documents. Consequently many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on creating and sharing documents. This limited us to sharing what we could write down.
I’ve decided to start capturing more examples of storytelling practice as part of my mission to ‘legitimise’ this as a valid knowledge management/knowledge sharing technique for the public sector. It’s a particular feature of the strategy behind the UK local government Knowledge Hub, a project I’m working on for the IDeA and which will leverage Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to support and develop good/next practice for local service improvement. More about this project in a later post.
I’ve been a long-time advocate of storytelling, and a regular follower of Shawn Callahan and his team over at Anecdote, but have only recently started to practice the techniques. I co-hosted an event with my colleague Michel Holmes where we used the Anecdote Storyelling Circles technique with a cohort of community of practice facilitators. It was a bit of a learning process for me and Michael as well as for the delegates, but it all seemed to go very well, with lots of useful stories emerging from the facilitators on their experiences in cultivating CoPs. I guess the measure of success in this instance is the fact that the facilitators asked if we could make this a regular event, which we’re now doing.
I also attended Shawn’s recent Storytelling Workshop that he ran during his vist to London, so I’m gradually gaining confidence in the techniques.
Shawn has posted this video which gives a good summary of the benefits of storytelling. To some this may all seem incredibly obvious, but the question occurs to me as to why this is not practiced more often as a means of sharing knowledge and information? I think most people would agree that it offers better learning potential than wading through the usual repositories of highly mediated and sanitised Case Studies and Success Stories.
I’d be interested in the views of any ‘KM professionals’ on this topic.
These are my links for July 28th through August 4th:
HootSuite – Save your time and save your sanity. Continue managing all of your Twitter profiles through one client: HootSuite!
Welcome – Kete is open source software that you can use to create online areas for collaboration for your community. Write topics and upload images, audio, video, documents. Discuss them all. Link them together.
It's been called a "relational wiki" and " a mashup between content management and knowledge managment". It's a fun way to get things done.
visualcomplexity.com | Knowledge Networks – VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
The Bamboo Project Blog: Some Links for Creating and Managing Your Own LinkedIn Group – I had to pull together some resources on using LinkedIn's Groups feature for a client, so thought it might be helpful to post the links here. These are more geared toward starting and running your own group, as opposed to finding and joining an existing group.
