These are my links for August 27th through August 28th:
These are my links for August 24th through August 26th:
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com – David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections.
- Ning says googbye to free accounts – The problem with a free lunch is that you don't always get to choose what you eat. I sympathise with the many users that have decided to close their Ning account rather than pay (the not unreasonable) monthly subscription. One thing I always look for now on any free service is what tools are available for exporting/migrating content. I learnt my lesson the hard way using Magnolia (all bookmarks lost) and Twine (now www.evri.com). At least with a paid service there is some liability on the service provider to deliver and maintain the service.<br />
<br />
Sounds like Ning have have made the right choices.
- Google Buzz not Buzzing – Google still doesn't appear to have hit that sweet spot of social networking. They should be applauded for persistence, but not sure how many bites of the cherry they will get before users grow tired of engaging with the latest beta product. I've been a long-time user of FriendFeed, so Buzz was not really a radical and compelling service. It's going to have to produce something pretty radical to shift users away from Facebook, which I still think is their long-term goal. Anyone out there who thrives on Buzz?
- DC10plus – DC10plus -The network for change – The DC10plus network aims to address social, economic, environmental and improved service delivery through the use of technology and innovation. It is a collaborative network of over 2,500 local authorities, industry, academe and the third sector partners dedicated to creating partnerships, sharing good practice and developing new initiatives.
Much has been written about best practice for developing and nurturing on-line communities , such as Communities of Practice (CoP), and the accepted wisdom is that technology by itself - no matter how good – will NOT deliver vibrant and successful communities. ‘Build it and they won’t come’ should be the mantra, as Google Wave so amply demonstrated (and I know this was not an on-line community in its purest sense before I get flamed!).
I’ve previously tried to illustrate this using  the analogy of baking a cake, where the cake’s ingredients e.g. sugar, butter, flour, eggs, milk are the component parts of an on-line community. To bake a really good cake you need all of these ingredients – missing out any one of them can result in something which either looks or tastes nothing like a cake.
Similarly missing out one of the ingredients in an on-line community will lead to potential failure of the community. Clearly some ingredients will be key – e.g. technology is going to be pretty important if it’s an on-line community! Members/users are important because they ARE the community. But let’s not forget the other ingredients, such as the community facilitator (also variously known as the community manager, steward or moderator) the business sponsor, the subject matter experts, the mentors, the librarians etc. Some of these roles may be combined, but  the functions they perform are distinct.  For now, I want concentrate on the role and function of the community facilitator, for I would argue that this role is the difference between the success and failure of an on-line community (and especially a CoP) – and I have the empirical evidence to prove it!
For any prior readers of this blog you will know I had (and still have) a key role in the development of the local government on-line community platform. Currently over 65,000 registered users and 1,300 CoPs.  Using various metrics available on the platform, I can clearly see the correlation between a successful community and the capability of the facilitator. If this role is so important to the health of the community, what skills and attributes are needed to be a successful facilitator? I’m still not entirely sure, though I do know it’s not a case of just providing some training – though this does help.  It’s more about personality; enthusiasm; willingness to share; being sensitive to the community environment; and energy….lots and lots of energy. Not the sort of things you can learn or teach using a pedagogical approach. I recall co-hosting a community facilitator’s story-telling session using the excellent Anecdote story-telling  guidelines. We got ten or so of the LG Improvement and Development (previously IDeA) exemplar community facilitators together to share their experience of what worked so that we could perhaps identify some key lessons that could be shared with all the other community facilitators. One recurrent theme was how hard they worked at making the community successful. There was nothing really unique or special that they were doing, other than putting energy and enthusiasm into their role. They believed in the goals for their community and worked at helping the community achieve them.
So, coming back to my original theme – what makes a successful on-line community? The community facilitator is the answer, and though it’s clear we need some useful technology to support an on-line environment, that alone will not deliver success.  If you will excuse me for switching metaphors, an on-line community (CoP) without a good facilitator is like have having a battery-driven toy without the batteries – and hence the title of this blog. This concept is supported by the accompanying slides, developed for a recent IBM webinar hosted and arranged by my good friend and colleague Luis Suarez (@elsua)  – and available for download from Slideshare.
To conclude – a brief story about a recent response to a proposal I received from a large government body who wanted a cost effective solution to improving knowledge sharing for their dispersed staff. There was a limited budget, and I identified a fairly low-cost collaborative technology solution that was well within the available budget. However, I also included a dependency on having a community facilitator/manager to ensure the success of this nascent community. Unfortunately the cost of the community facilitator/manager was more than twice the cost of the technology, and consequently the solution was starting to look expensive and unlikely to be accepted and implemented by the client. Yes, I could have just quoted the cost of the technology and then left them to get on with it, but then again, I’m not a technology vendor and I don’t believe in perpetuating the myth that technology delivers successful on-line communities. It would have been like leaving them with a battery-driven product but not telling them that the batteries were not included!
I hope the slides are useful for anyone involved in bulding and sustaining on-line communities – and if you happen to be a community facilitator, you have my utmost respect!
These are my links for August 21st through August 24th:
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- WSRP v2.0 Specification – Integration of remote content and application logic into an End-User presentation has been a task requiring significant custom programming effort. Typically, vendors of aggregating applications, such as a portal, write special adapters for applications and content providers to accommodate the variety of different interfaces and protocols those providers use. The goal of this specification is to enable an application designer or administrator to pick from a rich choice of compliant remote content and application providers, and integrate them with just a few mouse clicks and no programming effort. This revision of the specification adds Consumer managed coordination, additional lifecycle management and a set of related aggregation enhancements.
- URIBurner.com – A simple but powerful service that delivers RDF-based structured descriptions of Web addressable resources (documents or real world objects) in a variety of formats through Generic HTTP URIs. The underlying technology is Virtuoso's Sponger, which takes an existing Web-accessible resource (webpage, media) and generates an RDF graph of its metadata using existing well-known ontologies as well as site-specific knowledge. URIBurner then re-presents this data as either a new HTML webpage, or directly as RDF in a variety of serializations (RDF/XML, text/n3, turtle, JSON).
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- Twitter » 60 Twitter Tools to Track Tweets – Does what is says on the tin!
These are my links for August 14th through August 20th:
- 23 Things Home – 23 Things – Welcome to 23 Things, the course which introduces library staff to Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and new technologies. It has been developed by Portsmouth and Surrey library staff.
- A timeline of open government data – A time-line of events in the development of current open government data initiatives in the UK.
- OS OpenSpace developer wiki – Welcome to the OpenSpace wiki. The wiki has been created to help you during the development of your OS OpenSpace Application. OS OpenSpace allows Ordnance Survey Mapping to be displayed in your Web Page, below you will find a simple example of this.
- China leading the way in development of the Semantic Web? – As content and data-mining transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, or from Social Media to the Semantic Web, most thought leaders are betting on China as the front-runner in leading this charge. Chine is investing unprecedent amounts in developing 'the Internet of Things' and speculators are forcasting that Chongqing will be the next Silicon Valley. With the effects of the recession still biting in Europe and the US, I wouldn't bet against China taking an unassailable lead in the next generation development of the Web – variously labelled as Web 3.0, Semantic Web or Linked Data. Will this be of ultimate benefit to us all, or just to China? I think I know the answer to that one!
- Managing Personal Information and Knowledge Needs – I am honoured to have been asked by the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange (NetIKX) to give a talk/presentation at their AGM on 29th September about the challenges facing information professionals in today's digitally connected world. Exciting times – challenging times. Has there ever been a better time to be an infiormation professional?<br />
<br />
Please register for the meeting if this is a topic that may be of interest to you.
These are my links for August 10th through August 14th:
- Local Government Alliance Community of Practice – The International Development & Local Government Community of Practice (CoP) is now live! If you are working in local government and have an interest in international development issues, join our Community and meet & share ideas with like-minded people.
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- LocalGov 2.0 – Filed under 'data' – Examples of open and linked data use in Government and Local Government
- The Open Graph Protocol – The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.<br />
<br />
While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.
- HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable Online Community – A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted that “about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce.” <br />
There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing the three cardinal sins of running a community:<br />
* If you build it they will come. This can be attributed to the lure of “social software” that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend or create value for their customers.<br />
* Once I’ve launched it, I’m done. Many communities launch successfully, only to fade out and disappear. Due in large part to a failure to assign ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past “launch.”<br />
* Bigger is better. The assumption that the overall size of a community is indicative of its success.<br />
<br />
All three can cause a community to fail, and there are plenty of examples. Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making these mistakes.
I had the privilege if being invited to present at the EDO 2010 International Congress in Barcelona at the Centre for Legal Studies and Specialized Training on 12, 13, 14 May 2010. The conference theme was “New training strategies for oganisations†and I did a session on ‘Cultivating Knowledge Through Communities of Practiceâ€. The slides I used are available for download from Slideshare and embedded in this post.
My sincere thanks to Jesús Martinez Marin and the organiser for the exceptional hospitality I received.
The following is taken from the EDO website and has been translated from Spanish to English.
More than 350 experts and specialists in the subject mostly from Spain and America have actively participated in the five international conferences, the ten symposia and four tables of communications, analyzing and discussing the more than 75 selected contributions. The general conclusions:
- The current society considers the knowledge and training of workers as strategic elements of organizations. Thus, intellectual capital has become one of the main resources that are available to institutions to achieve their ends.
- The organization is an association of persons, governed by a set of rules, to be able to create, develop and disseminate new knowledge to increase its innovative capacity and competitive. Therefore, knowledge management should focus its attention on the possibility that members of the organization share the greatest number of sources of information and collaborate in the creation of new knowledge.
- Knowledge management promotes organizations create intelligent, able to transform information into knowledge through collective learning processes. Included in this connection to distinguish between “managing” and “stacking” the knowledge of the organization between the various technological supports.
- Organizations need to understand and manage the existing knowledge or which may be created from an impulsive reflective practice of co-construction of knowledge. The co-construction of knowledge involves not only a dynamic work that is scheduled and help to move from the informal knowledge to formal knowledge, but also requires experience in which you want to work.
- The organizations have expressed new forms of living on the virtual network, which becomes an essential tool for the exchange of information, knowledge and experiences. The virtual communities of practice are considered in this connection, a good practice that encourages learning and promotes the integration of informal learning, in line with a change of training model.
- Collaborative work is successful when it occurs among peers, there is a mutual commitment, the organization is flexible and e-moderator exercises its role effectively. It’s about the content and learning processes that take place in virtual communities of practice, being the Information Technology and Communication (ICT) are just a tool that helps make communication more effective.
- Organizational learning theories agree on the existence of certain internal and external factors that facilitate or hinder learning. Such factors include, among others, collaborative culture, leadership, collaborative and / or the existence of a flexible structure. Change does not preclude the assumption of error, nor problem-solving and competent incompetence.
- The self has a high attitude component. Thus, self-learning experiences and networking are built among all participating members with the community and in the context of uncertainty. Is stressed in this connection the words of M. Benedetti: “When we thought we had all the answers, they changed the questions.”
- The importance of identifying informal learning has increased in recent years. In fact, there are already systems and methodologies, European and Spanish level, certifying skills acquired on the job. It is envisaged, therefore, other ways to access traditional knowledge related to the formal processes established.
- The creation and management of knowledge in the educational system implies a paradigm shift which includes the participation and experimentation of new scenarios by inducing agents of change. In this regard, there is talk of optimal conditions for their development as transformational leadership and sparse, teamwork, collaborative culture and flexible structure, if and when they occur simultaneously and seamlessly.
- It stresses the need to create models in the education system, combining knowledge management and quality management, address the objectives of the education system and teacher not only in itself.
- Managing knowledge is synonymous with a continuous cyclical process of identification, modification, use and evaluation of that knowledge. The EFQM model or similar can help this by emphasizing its usefulness as a tool for self-evaluation. Barcelona, June 2010 contributions and specific conclusions can be analyzed in the book of Acts of Congress to which reference is: GairÃn, J. (Ed.) (2010): New training strategies for the organizations. Madrid: Wolters Kluwer Education. Ã Review available in: http://edo.uab.es/PDF/FichasActividades/Formacion/Pub_CIEDO.pdf
Conclusions: http://edo.uab.cat/JornadasEDO2010/
Video
These are my links for August 2nd through August 6th:
- Linked Data Tools Free Downloads Semantic Web – Whether you are an experienced developer, or simply interested in how this new technology is going to change the future of the web, the semantic web can be a change of thinking. We show you tutorials, progressive examples and working applications to help your learning.
- Knowledge Hub: an animated film – The Knowledge Hub – a single window into local government improvement (video)
Below, just some of the reaction to the UK government’s response to a petition submitted to Downing Street in February that opposed UK Gov’s continued endorsement of Microsoft’s IE 6.  It shows a complete and absolute misunderstanding of the issue. As the author here says, “…you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else”.
Apart from which, it’s not just an issue of cost of replacing IE6, it’s the cost across the whole of the public sector of maintaining websites that must support the IE6 browser. I know we’ve spent at least 25% of the development cost for the local government CoP platform on making every change backward compatible to IE6.
And not forgetting, it’s not just a security issue, it’s a usability and a productivity problem – users can’t access facilities on some sites (e.g. YouTube), and lack of support for plug-ins means you can’t use some of the neat integration facilities that support sharing and collaboration on many social media/social networking websites.
But then again, user productivity doesn’t appear to feature in this decision. Something the government may yet come to regret once someone calculates the true cost of sticking with IE6!
See previous blog on this topic.
UK.gov sticks to IE 6 cos it’s more ‘cost effective’, innit
Computers in Whitehall will largely continue to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which will make web coders spit out their cheese‘n’pickle sarnies this lunchtime.
“It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE 8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.â€
“To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users,†it said.
The petition itself was sent to Number 10 earlier this year asking then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to follow German and French governments’ decisions to ditch IE 6.
“Apparently the IT team in Whitehall has yet to realise you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else,” Reg reader Mark told us.
“As a senior web application developer, the mention of the positive word ‘standards’ in a document about IE6 makes me die a little on the inside — ‘Public sector organisations are free to identify software that supports their business needs as long as it adheres to appropriate standards’ — I’m not sure which standards they mean… but certainly not the HTML ones.”
Alas, Internet Explorer 6 is here to stay to keep the wheels of central government turning in this big fat society of ours, people.
Read more at www.theregister.co.uk
See this at Amplify
