I’ve just completed my first ‘Hot Seat’ session for the IDeA Communities of Practice. My specialist subject “The Knowledge Hub”. I think I managed to answer all of the questions correctly, and was encouraged to see that we had over 470 page views during the 2-hour session. I was encouraged by the interest in this project from such a wide variety of users. Some challenging questions as well – all available at the Facilitation Now! conference 26th Feb.
I think that most community of practice (CoP) facilitators or moderators will recognise the challenge in getting conversations started within the community. The ratio of ‘lurkers’ to ‘contributors’ is one of the standard indicators that should be measured for any CoP in order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and health of the CoP. It’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will be a contributor, and the fact that members don’t contribute doesn’t mean they are not getting some value from the CoP. However, there’s nothing wrong in encouraging more contributions, and I’ve seen various incentives used to increase contribution rates.
I thought this particular scheme being implemented for the local government CoP platform was particularly inventive, and I’ll be interested to see how successful it is (I have access to the platform-wide metrics). This message was sent out to all registered users of the CoP platform:
Dear CoP member,
It hasn’t been long since communities of practice welcomed its 50,000th member, yet we’ve hardly had time to register such a momentous milestone before that number is actually closer to the 55,000 member mark. And with a pool of over a thousand different communities to choose from, the potential benefits to the local government and wider public sector of those members sharing what they know grows significantly every day.
It’s no surprise to hear that the secret behind the platform’s success is its members – you! Without you, there would be nothing to share, no one to share with, and the variety and vibrancy of many communities wouldn’t be close to the level they are today.
To celebrate reaching this milestone, we want to say thank you by giving something back to all you sharers out there.
So, from February 16, we’re beginning a new campaign, Everyone ’s a sharer! where the first hundred CoP members each month to make their very first contribution on the platform will receive a small-but-tasty appreciation of our gratitude, with further reward going to each month’s top sharers, as well as to those members who make the highest number of contributions.
We’re also looking into starting a recognition system for those who make a lot of contributions to communities. In the coming months, members who make over 50 contributions will see a bronze heart appear on their profile; 100 contributions will be silver; and 150 gold.
So get involved by contributing as much as you can to your communities, and share your knowledge. Because after all…
… Everyone ’s a sharer!
Hopefully this post might stimulate some more ideas on how to increase contribution rates from those involved in CoPs. I would add this mantra for CoP facilitators/moderators: “Know who your contributors are….and look after them!”
It’s always pleasing to get some good publicity about how Communities of Practice are reshaping the way that local government works; creating new opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration and co-creation.
The article in e-government bulletin says it all, and indeed I was one of the panel of three who were invited to judge the entries for the CoP of the Year award mentioned in the article. A very difficult decision I might add, since all of the entries demonstrated the passion and commitment of the facilitators and community members in delivering improvement in local government services. Well done to all involved.
I would just like to add (before I get completely air-brushed out of history) that I was responsible for the original concept and strategy for the IDeA CoP platform, which emerged from a 3-year knowledge management strategy I was asked to produce for the Improvement and Development Agency, and I’m still involved in the strategic development of the platform. Some background to the project can be found as a Case Study on my website. It seems I need to take care of my own publicity!
If anyone is interested in ‘what happens next’, the follow-up strategy (’the next 3 years’) is all wrapped up with the Knowledge Hub, a topic I’ve previously posted on and will be adding to over the coming weeks. A case of ‘watch this space!
There has been much written about measuring the value of online communities such as Social Networks or Communities of Practice. However, most pundits tend to think of measuring value from a purely financial perspective, i.e. the Return on Investment (ROI). Clearly this is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor that should be considered. Surprisingly few organisations consider the value that is being created by having better informed and more knowledgeable staff, or the potential value of getting closer to customers and local communities. These latter factors are quite difficult to measure in terms of ROI, and will normally take more than one business cycle (e.g. a financial year) before any meaningful financial measures can be made. Unfortunately – and especially in today’s financial climate – organisations plan around 1 or 2 year business years, whereas online communities will not usually be time-limited, and very rarely be driven by finance and budgets. Allowing for the relatively small cost of bandwidth and technology, conversations are – for the most part – deemed to be free.
I was pleased to see that Matt Rhodes over at Freshnetworks did refer to non-financial ROI, though I would have liked to have seen more emphasis on the value that is generated for the members of these online communities, rather than the usual social media impact measures (numbers of page hits, numbers of conversations etc.) – important as these are, and adequately illustrated in the accompanying presentation.
I have taken a slightly different approach to the issue of how the value of online communities is measured, giving more emphasis to the discovery of value rather than the dispassionate assembly of a series of metrics – financial or otherwise. I should also add that the perspective is on public sector communities since this is where I’ve been primarily engaged over the past few years. The main points are covered in a presentation I gave to the Public Health Information Network Conference earlier this year and reproduced below:
1. We need to distinguish between cost and value.
I used the humble nutmeg to illustrate this point. Weight for weight more valuable than gold in 17th century Europe. The spice was held to have powerful medicinal properties. It rocketed in price when physicians in Elizabethan London claimed that their nutmeg pomanders were the only certain cure for the plague. So, cost was very high, but the value? Well, despite the assertions of the medical experts of the day, it certainly didn’t cure the plague!
The point is reinforced by the following quotations:
I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things. Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900.
2. We are more likely to find and create value from the communities we choose for ourselves than the communities we are compelled to join.
I have argued that one of the key characteristics of a Community of Practice is the fact that the members are self-selected, i.e. they are there because they want to be there and not because they have to be there. They may select to become members because they share the same interests, passions and goals as the other members. A successful CoP will create value for the members – either collectively in terms of working towards a common goal or objective, or personally, e.g. through self-development or sharing knowledge.
3. We are re-discovering networks and communities and through them, re-learning how to have conversations.
It’s sad fact that 20th century working practices and pressures of modern life have led to a sense of personal isolation. Mass production, prescriptive and repetitive tasks and limited social opportunities in the workplace have created a workforce conditioned to think and act as a corporate entity, limiting individual aspirations and creative thought. The opportunities for sharing information and knowledge have been gradually eroded over the past 50 years; social clubs have closed; people don’t have the time (or money) to regularly socialise after work; we are increasingly driven by task-oriented emails.
What is sometimes forgotten is that professional communities, where good and notable practice is shared amongst fellow artisans, are still flourishing today in the form of Worshipful Companies (over 800 in London alone), with most having existed for many hundreds of years. Communities of Practice are not new; they’ve just discovered they can exist in a virtual world. The key issue for many people though, is learning how to have on-line conversations. The following points from one of the slides are worth re-iterating:
We don’t know what we don’t know
People don’t learn from content – they learn from other people.
We don’t know the value of knowledge until it is shared
We need to find where the conversations are happening….and join in!
And…
Dialogue is NOT:
Discussion, deliberation, negotiation
Committee, team, task or working group
Majority wins, minority dominance, groupthink
Dialogue IS:
Free-flowing exchange of ideas among equals
All ideas are solicited and are considered
Best ideas rise to the top
4. ROI doesn’t just mean ‘Return on Investment’
I’ve taken the liberty of using something I once heard Euan Semple say: “Keep the I small and the R will look after itself”. I think this is a good mantra because anyone worth their salt in the Social Media/Social Web world knows that implementing a social media strategy doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The days of multi-million pound corporate websites is fast diminishing, and anyone with this amount of money to spend is going to be quite rightly questioned on ROI – and they better make sure they have the answers.
I’ve given some alternative definitions for ROI, such as:
Return on Influence
Return on Interaction
Return on Impact
These are the things which should be measured for value, and add a different dimension to the traditional financial measures.
5. Recognise that value to the organisation is different from value to the individual.
There is an over-emphasis on measuring value of online communities from the organisational perspective. I’ve given a (financial) example in the slides, using cost savings of online conferences as an example. However, it is important to remember that there is also a value to the individual in being a member of an online community, and this aspect often goes unrecognised (and unmeasured). The value or benefit to a community member is quite difficult to measure (the member may not be able to articulate or recognise what knowledge they have gained from the community) and any outcomes may not be easily aligned with corporate goals (e.g. job satisfaction). It is nevertheless important to consider this dimension in any overall value measurement. Qualitative metrics can provide some answers, but it’s also useful to examine quantitative data to gain a better understanding of the community itself, e.g.:
Number of community members
Number of contributions
Number of contributors
Number of inactive users
Having a Social Network Analysis (SNA) application is even better, since this can reveal who the key ‘nodes’ are in the community chatter. It’s a useful discipline to consider what would happen to the online community if these community members decided to leave the community. Dependency on one or two ‘power’ contributors should be recognised as a risk.
The presentation concludes with a number of lessons learnt from the IDeA CoP platform, which has now been active (and by all measures, successful) for over 3 years. It’s always useful to have a distilled list of “do’s” and “don’ts”, herewith reproduced:
Do…
..identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities
..let users drive their own experimentation and use of tools.
..target and support areas that have a clear desire and need.
..build trust and relationships face to face where possible.
..condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
..use online conferences and ‘Hot Seats’ to build membership growth and encourage conversations.
Don’t…
..think you can force people to collaborate
..assume everyone understands how to use Web2.0/social media tools.
..assume everyone knows how to contribute.
..worry about the ‘lurkers’.
..let command, control or hierarchy hamper or kill your community
..set unrealistic targets
I hope this has been helpful to anyone involved with social networks or communities of practice, and particularly those who need to show that their online communities are delivering value. Just remember there is more to ROI than finance!
The second meeting of the Knowledge Hub Advisory Group took place yesterday, 7th December. ( For some background to the Knowledge Hub see previous posting).
It was regretable that we didn’t get more attendees from local authorities, but those who did manage to attend were involved in some excellent workshop sessions aimed at teasing out their vision for how the Knowledge Hub would deliver efficiency and performance improvements for the local government sector. This was a valuable exercise because we managed to put some flesh and bones onto what has been up until now an abstract concept for many people. Before reporting on the outcomes from the meeting, a brief summary of the terms of reference for the Advisory Group:
The Advisory Group membership will be made up of technical and social innovators and local authority officers each with practical experience in helping deliver Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 solutions within the public sector or workplace, and with experience in cultivating a culture of knowledge sharing and self-development. The Advisory Group will:
Provide technical advice and strategic insight for the procurement and development of the technical platform.
Identify opportunities and sources for seeding and pump-priming content for the knowledge hub.
Provide expert advice in the development of a new ‘knowledge ecology’ for the sector, where the sector can learn from its own experience and where barriers to participative learning can be identified and resolved.
Advise on new and emerging knowledge sharing techniques such as social reporting, narrative & storytelling, and development of games for simulation of behaviours.
Identify training needs and other support requirements for the sector.
Provide on-going help in resolving problems and provide a quality assurance function for the Programme.
The main element of the meeting was a workshop session where delegates worked on two scenarios and my thanks to Ingrd Koehler for making these both challenging and a reflection of the sort of issues facing local authority staff.
Scenario 1
You work with Hubville City Council. You are new to the Youth Offending Team. In a meeting with the Performance Officer in charge of LAA (Local Area Agreement) monitoring and another officer from the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership you discover that councillors are concerned that your area doesn’t look on track to meet a key monitoring figure for its LAA : NI 111 (national indicator) – First time entrants to the Youth Justice System aged 10-17. It’s a single measure, but part of a wider set of priorities about reducing youth crime and anti-social behaviour among youth in general – and in some ‘blighted’ communities in particular. You are going to conduct a snapshot review of your current programme and try to identify a network of people who can help you. How will Knowledge Hub help you to: Identify your current performance and compare it with others. Understand how you can track and monitor information which might be related to or influence NI 111 (for example – reported crimes, prosecution rates, NI 117 the number of 16-18 year olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs))
Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement journey.
Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 111
Share your story and help others find the resources that worked for you.
Map your journey using the paper and materials provided. How will you come into the hub? What will it look like? What data sources do you expect to find? How will you navigate through it? How will you others be able to see and learn from what you’re doing? What ‘new’ data, aggregated data or mashups do you expect to create with the resources you have found? How will you make these new resources available to others?
Use the sheets provided, markers, stickers, etc to draw your map.
Output from Scenario 1
Scenario 2:
You work for Hubville Primary Care Trust. You’ve never worked for local government, but now you’re looking at working with Hubville City Council on a partnership target of reducing: National Indicator (NI) 39 Rate of hospital admission for 100,000 population for alcohol related harm. As well as a serious problem with binge drinking among young people, there is an older workless population with a high incidence of alcohol related illness. This has only gotten worse since the Hubville Automated Industries closed down last year. As people in the council don’t feel the direct financial impact of this indicator you have to work to influence council partners and other local public service, business and voluntary sector partners. You know something about Local Area Agreements and the local strategic partnership, but you’re unsure how to find out all the information you need. How will Knowledge Hub help you to:
Identify your current performance and compare it with others and identify how the council’s performance is contributing to this indicator.
Understand how you can track and monitor information which might be related to or influence NI 39 (for example NI 20: Assault with injury crime rate NI 21: Dealing with local concerns about anti-social behaviour and crime issues by the local council and police )
Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement journey
Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 39
Share your story and help others find the resources that worked for you.
Use the sheets provided, markers, stickers, etc to draw your map.
Output from Scenario 2:
The key fetaures that surfaced from this mapping process process were:
A central dashboard function, allowing you to choose types of information and subject areas – it would allow you to see what’s new, what’s hot and what’s relevant to you
High levels of personalisation – you can choose your own dashboard – the functions that you want, but at the same time it would help you make links to things you didn’t know existed.
It would allow you to make associations with ‘people like me’ – those who had similar responsibilities in their work – as well as to identify ‘experts’ in different specialised areas. Or be recognised as an expert yourself.
It would make it easy to share your experience and your views – even if you didn’t always know that you were doing so – that is – just the fact that 20 performance officers in a council had downloaded a document would have more weight than if no one had – or that only external consultants had.
It would help central and local government facilitate the development of a community (of interest or practice) around a particular indicator, where the community would define the performance parameters and measurement criteria for the indicator.
We followed this up with a Knowledge Cafe, where we posed the questions:
What social media skills are required to navigate and share information and stories of improvement?
What’s the best way of explaining what the Knowledge Hub has to offer? (i.e. it’s not just another website)
Outputs from these discussions as follows:
And finally, the wrap-up courtesy of David Wilcox, Social Reporter:
So, grateful thanks to all who attended the meeting and for both arcticulating and mapping out for us what the Knowledge Hub is all about. The next stage is conveting all this into a real product – which is well underway as part of the procurement process. The next meeting of the Advisory Group will be in the first quarter of 2010.
This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything about the Knowledge Hub (Khub) Advisory Group meeting that took place last week (17th September) in London – though a number of my colleagues have been pretty active in the blogosphere and twitterverse on the topic. In particular I found Ingrid Khoeler’s post pretty much spot on and wondered if indeed if I had anything more to say on the topic. Well, clearly yes, because I’ve started this post!
Maybe I should start by giving some background to this project. I think the story starts in summer 2005 when I was contracted by the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) to develop a three year knowledge management strategy. Though it’s only 4 years ago, much has changed on the KM landscape since then, not least of which is the development of Web 2.0 tools and techniques to support knowledge sharing. However, I distinctly recall that this was deemed a high risk strategy when I raised the concept of developing a Web 2.0 platform that would support communities of practice (CoPs) working in local government, and switching emphasis from publishing (i.e. broadcasting) information on cases studies and best practice to connecting people who have the same goals or same issues, such that they can collectively solve problems and share learning with other practitioners working in the sector. I should also add that the term ‘Web 2.0’ was not even invented when we started this programme; it is accredited to Tim O’Reillywho used the term for the first time later that year.
Winding the clock forward 4 years it is easy to forget how incredibly difficult it was to get this project off the ground and in particular getting to a point where there were sufficient number of users and communities to ensure the strategy was self-sustaining. With over 35,000 users and more than 900 CoPs, I think we’ve achieved this, and the CoP platform has gone on to win a number of industry awards for encouraging team working and knowledge sharing in local government. However it will come as no surprise to KM professionals working in this space to know that the technology was the easiest bit; establishing trusted communities and developing new ways of working is where the real effort was required.
I was almost caught by surprise when I was asked ‘what next?’ when the anniversary of the 3-year strategy came around in 2008. I struggled with this question for some time, and spent an uncomfortable winter of 2008/9 coming up with a strategy for the ‘next 3 years’. However, I did eventually present a strategy paper to the IDeA KM Steering Group in February 2009 which described the idea of a ‘Knowledge Hub’. The concept is largely based on personal experience as a KM practitioner in trying to keep up to date with new ideas and good practice. This entailed belonging to many different professional networks, both on-line and off-line, active use of social bookmarking and development of many different types of lenses and filters – such as RSS feed aggregators and personalised dashboards – in order to make some sense of the growing mass of information that was available. In essence, picking out the conversations that add value from the background noise.
Reflecting on the tools and techniques I used, I realised that though the ‘Web 2.0’ landscape has made it far easier to connect with people and share knowledge, it has also created its own complexities. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t get invited to join another social network. Standards such as Open Social do help in creating the links between the community platforms that adopt this standard, but we’re still a long way from having one ubiquitous standard that all vendors are happy to support – and maybe this is utopia.
In developing the ‘next 3 years’ strategy it was also helpful to look at what had worked and what hadn’t with the IDeA CoP platform. Interestingly (and this is where I often wish I’d taken a degree in anthropology or sociology) most communities were being set up as private spaces, and there was little evidence of inter-community knowledge sharing. It was as if we’d created a platform which encouraged silos of knowledge to develop. And, with the exception of the IDeA-sponsored CoPs, it was very difficult to solicit information on how successful these closed and private CoPs were in achieving their goals. This has been partly addressed by having a ‘Community Hub’, an enhancement to the CoP platform that went live in October 2008 which encourages CoP members to publish what they are doing in a common community space visible to all users of the platform.
So, we come to the ‘Knowledge Hub’. What is it? How will it overcome silo’d knowledge repositories? How will it help users to connect and share knowledge more effectively? How will it help to improve local government services? Quite simply, it will support more effective decision making by making it far easier for users to filter, share and access the information that is most relevant to them, using personal profile data and activity streams to improve relevance. We’re all familiar with commercial websites such as Amazon which give us information about ‘customers who purchased this also purchased…’, and reviews from customers on how good/bad a product is, so why not reuse and adapt these techniques for professional networking platforms? Again, Amazon were doing this long before the term Web 2.0 was bandied around, yet they are one of the best exponents of Web2.0 technology to engage with and better understand their customers. So, we’re not really doing anything new with the Knowledge Hub, other than applying these tools and techniques to a professional network of local government staff.
The Khub will support social computing and adopt open standards that enable connections to be made between personal and professional networks.
It will be a vantage point and visualisation tool, providing ‘heat maps’ showing emerging trends and ideas. It will have a serendipity engine which enables new topics and ‘hot’ conversations to bubble up to the top.
Content sources will include Twitter feeds – e.g. from local councils, Blogs, RSS feeds from council websites and other public, private and third sector organisations involved in public services. It will have access to publicly available datasets and enable mashups between different data sources to be created for value-added services. For example, overlaying data on knife crime with socio-demographic data, displayed against Google Maps to indicate ‘hot spots’ or where local authority initiatives have had most impact.
It will be an open platform where APIs can be used for developing value-added services. Widgets and plug-ins can be developed for users to easily customise and personalise their interface to the system, e.g. using iGoogle, Netvibes or iPhones.
It will support benchmarking and data visualisation tools that enable councils to compare and contrast services in order to identify lines of inquiry that may lead to greater efficiency savings (see post by Ingrid on the Efficiency Exchange).
It’s also a big, bold and ambitious project with many stakeholders, and particularly the department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) who are funding the project.
It is therefore extremely important that we have an empowered and ‘expert’ Advisory Group, drawn from a cohort of freelance and independent social innovators who are currently delivering collaborative solutions to the public sector, together with stakeholders from central government and social media early adopters working in councils and local communities. The Group will help shape the project over the coming months, and help in identifying the training and support that may be needed in local authorities in order to ensure its success.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a 3-year strategy, but at least now the journey is now underway!
Check out the slides below to get a better perspective of what this all about or contact me if you need any more information. See also Dave Briggs post on The Partnerships and Places Library prototype – which is one of the discreet projects that will feed into the development of the Knowledge Hub. There’s a lot happening out there!
If you want to follow the conversations around this topic, then sign-in or join the FriendFeed ‘room’.
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.
The following abstract is from “Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians: Exploring Considerations and Engaging Participation”, Contributed Paper, ACRL 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, 14th March 2009 by Joe Murphy and Heather Moulaison.
I thought it worth replicating and promoting here since it provides a consolidated perspective on some core competencies for social networking applicable to Librarians (the original intended audience) , and also Community of Practice facilitators/moderators or community managers who’s skill-set should embrace many aspects of the traditional Librarian role. The bracketed inserts are my own.
The following competencies are a suggested set of skills that librarians (and community managers) should possess as social networking literate information professionals capable of implementing library services and utilising information within social networking sites. These include skills for interacting with patrons within the sites, understanding and articulating the nature of social networking sites and their potential roles related to library services, creating presences and content, evaluating and applying information, and having the ability to assist patrons with gaining and applying these skills. Librarians (and community managers) possessing these skills are capable of efficiently and effectively navigating online social networking sites and applying their expertise to services with and within this now central realm for interacting with information.
Understanding and Articulating Social Networking Sites and Their Roles
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) is capable of articulating the nature and roles of online social networking sites and their importance in scholarly research and communication, and the information cycle. Librarians (and community managers) should be familiar with a diversity of social networking sites and social media including those most relevant to their patrons. Librarians (and community managers) also need to be able to articulate the importance of online social networking sites and their applications for libraries to peers, administrators, and patrons.
Creating Content
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) is capable of creating, contributing, and revising content in various formats including images, text, audio, video, links, and more within and beyond the presence of their library in a variety of social networking sites with various tools. This extends to creating the library presence including pages, groups, profiles, and applications.
Evaluating Information
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) is capable of critically evaluating information encountered in social networking sites on the basis of authority, currency, and bias etc. Librarians (and community managers) also need to be able to assist patrons in gaining and applying these skills to evaluate information they encounter in various online social networks.
Applying Information Ethically and Legally
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) applies information in social networking sites ethically and legally. They respect copyright and intellectual property of information encountered and applied in social networking sites, and conscious of the unique cultural norms. This includes applying information found in social networking sites to other media and applying information to projects within social networking sites.
Searching and Navigating
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) knows how to effectively search and browse various online social networks for known and unknown contacts, and for information and resources in a variety of formats. This includes understanding the search tools available within the sites, knowledge of using outside search engines to search the sites, and an understanding of what information and fields are searchable. Skills for navigating and browsing within the sites and between a variety of individual networks and outside websites is also important.
Interacting
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) is familiar with the diverse methods of communicating with social networking sites and is aware of and able to apply the unique cultural norms and expectations of each communication method. All social networking sites allow for varying degrees of interactivity that can serve as avenues for connecting with patrons.
Communication channels include messaging within the sites, posts on profile walls, comments on status updates, notes, pictures, posted items and blogs, and the sites’ various synchronous chat features.
Also important are the skills for interacting over the various mobile communication channels popular with some social networking sites. Librarians (and community managers) should posses the skills for interacting with patrons in these sites via smart phone applications, mobile webpages, email, software and third party clients, and text message.
Teaching
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) is capable of teaching these skills to library patrons and peers. This includes guiding and training patrons through targeted aspects of social networking sites that arise in their use as resources and tools, teaching about the use of social networking sites for scholarly purposes, and teaching faculty and instructors about the role of social networking sites and considerations for issues affecting their students’ work.
Providing Services
The social networking literate librarian (and community manager) utilises a variety of online social networking sites to provide quality library services. They evaluate social network sites and choose which are most appropriate to establish a library presence in. They are capable of building and managing the library’s presence in the form of profiles or applications, developing work flows for services, marketing services, weeding spam, understanding and working with privacy levels, assessing the library’s presence and services, leveraging tagging and favouriting, understanding and engaging vendor and other third party applications, and being aware of relevant security topics. It is important that librarians are familiar with the steps and etiquette for initiating and responding to friend requests in building networks.
Flexibility
Flexibility is the defining skill for librarians (and community managers) engaging people and information through social networking sites. Librarians (and community managers) must be able to apply the above skills to unique and novel social networking sites as they emerge and evolve. Familiarity with each of the above skills in multiple social networking sites will help librarians (and community managers) be flexible in applying these skills to future sites and services.
The most important, and possibly hardest to develop, skill is the ability to look ahead, visualise, create, and manage robust library (and community) services in full consideration of and within social networking sites. This takes vision, creativity, and a constant thumb on the pulse of the social web, its users, and their behaviours.
Great blog post from Nick Milton , all about the Knowledge Management culture shift. I’d seen this before, but worth repeating since I think it encapsulates the key elements of collaboration in successful communities of practice, a key area of work I’ve been involved in for the past 4 years. It’s a useful exercise to consider these points as both an individual and as part of a group/community exercise to gain a perspective of where you , your organisation or your community are on your KM journey:
From “I know” to “We know”
From “Knowledge is mine” to “Knowledge is ours”
From “Knowledge is owned” to “Knowledge is shared”
From “Knowledge is personal property” to “Knowledge is collective/community property”
From “Knowledge is personal advantage” to “Knowledge is company advantage”
From “Knowledge is personal” to “Knowledge is inter-personal”
From “I defend what I know” to “I am open to better knowledge”
From “not invented here (i.e. by me)” to “invented in my community”
From “New knowledge competes with my personal knowledge” to “new knowledge improves my personal knowledge”
From “other people’s knowledge is a threat to me” to “our shared knowledge helps me”
From “Admitting I don’t know is weakness” to “Admitting I don’t know is the first step to learning”
Nick goes on to comment:
That shift from “I know” to “we know” – from “Knowledge is mine” to “Knowledge is ours” is a huge one, and counter-cultural to many of us. People can find it scary, but once it has been achieved, it is like living in a different, and far better, world.
Agree with that, and have never underestimated how difficult it is to achieve this cultural shift.
Within the context of communities of practice it reflects a view of knowledge as the property of human communities and places the emphasis on connections between people and cultivating, recognising and supporting a shared learning experience.
I’m pleased to announce that the IDeA CoP Platform won an award at the GC Awards yesterday evening. The award was for the best public sector project for collaborative working, and can be placed alongside the award we won at the National e-Government awards ceremony that took place in December 2008.
I’m particularly pleased for the IDeA Knowledge Management team who have been instrumental in getting Communities of Practice firmly established across the local government sector as means to encouraging more effective learning and sharing, which will in turn drive the development of good/next practice for service improvement. And not forgetting the many CoP Facilitator’s who do such a good job in maintaining the energy for their CoPs and providing inspiration for their members.
For those who know me they will know I have little or no ego, but in the absence of any recognition from IDeA, I would at least like to note that I was the original creator of the concept and have led the business and strategic development of the platform since its inception in 2005. I only mention this because I’ve been almost alone in trying to promote this strategy over the past few years and was even beginning to doubt myself whether this would ever achieve the original vision for changing and improving working practices across the public sector. I think having this recognition from two independent awards bodies has renewed my self-belief and will provide a good foundation for taking the strategy forward.
The actual entry for the award is reproduced below:
Aims and Objectives
The IDeA’s Communities of Practice (CoPs) is a professional networking site that utilises web 2.0 technology to support the sharing of knowledge, know-how, skills and good practice across local government. Since its official launch in December 2007, CoPs has enhanced working practices across local government throughout the UK. Enabling officers and councillors to connect to peers, information and knowledge, across the nation, has driven the effectiveness and efficiency of the sector. Additionally, CoPs is now driving improvements across central government and the third sector as the site is expanding to other organisations who wish to realise the benefits of online collaborative working.
CoPs now has over 30,000 registered members and is growing at a rate of 100 new members a day, (a rate more than double that targeted at the beginning of the project). On the site there are over 700 individual communities managed by the IDeA, councils, civil service departments, and other public and third sector organisations. The individual communities range across areas such as countering extremism, health, migration, ICT and many more. By the end of 2009 CoPs is expected to exceed 50,000 members and support 1000 communities.
How the solution was developed
Local government accounts for the second largest proportion of public spending in the UK, and employs about 2.1 million people across over 700 service areas. Accordingly, this represents a vast variety of skills, knowledge, experience and expertise. Prior to the introduction of CoPs, however, the sector’s ability to share knowledge and expertise across organisational boundaries, and learn from each other in order to improve service delivery to local populations was limited and ad hoc. IDeA’s Communities of Practice has enabled all local councils to share and learn with and from each other. It is enabling local government to transcend traditional organisational boundaries, allowing colleagues in all different councils across the UK to work and collaborate together, to drive efficiency savings and improve the sector.
CoPs has enabled this learning and sharing through utilising collaborative, new social media (what has been referred to as Web 2.0) tools, such as wikis, blogs, forums and libraries, which allow users to contribute and generate their own content for the site. This has meant that costs associated with CoPs have been kept exceptionally low as the site’s consumers also act as producers.
CoPs was developed as a bespoke and secure platform designed for simplicity and accessibility and with it’s target government audience in mind. There is nothing directly comparable to the IDeA’s CoPs in terms of size and reach anywhere in the world. In the social networking sphere, sites such as Facebook and My Space share the same connective and collaborative spirit, but do not provide the trusted and private environment demanded by public sector professionals.
The creation and implementation of CoPs began in September 2006 when a pilot site was released. The pilot site had a limited number of pilot communities that were used to test the demand for the site and to ascertain what skills, interventions and techniques were needed to ensure that individual communities were vibrant, active and created value for members and the organisations they belonged to. The pilot site provided the evidence and learning that was needed to officially launch the current Communities of Practice site and ensure that it was a success. Building on the success and failures of the pilot the current CoP platform was launched in December to anyone across local government wanting either to join or create their own community, and as momentum has grown has also been opened to others across central government and the wider public sector.
In addition to the creation of the actual web-platform, implementation involved significant focus on upskilling and training of people to use CoPs. The idea recognised that often government IT projects had the potential to fail not because of the technology involved but because the people expected to use and gain value from the technology were not comfortable with or properly able to use the technology. As a consequence CoP training was made available on one level for all who wanted to create and manage a community (facilitators) and on another level for ordinary members or those wanting to know more about CoPs and how to use the site.
Outcomes and Benefits
CoPs has been making a difference to individuals using the site, local councils and local government and public sector more widely. In a recent evaluation exercise designed to understand how users had benefited from CoPs, a number of the site’s members were interviewed about their experiences. The research confirmed 8 major benefits being obtained which all increase government efficiency and lead to cost savings:
1. Saving time
“Using the website saves time. It’s possible to post something and get responses back from other members over a couple of weeks. Previously, you would talk to a few confidantes, then share things at conferences and it might be six months before you have the same level of strength in terms of that idea”
James Winterbottom, Performance Improvement Officer, Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council
2. Keeping up to date with the most current thinking
It’s just extremely useful to keep up to date, for example on current thinking and direction with regards to equality and cohesion policy. The policy changes a lot, there are different emphasis, directions and initiatives all the time.”
Ruth Hyde, Chief Executive, Broxtowe Borough Council
3. Progressing innovations
“Many of the online groups that we set up on the site either reflected new projects or were new groups working on a new priority that wasn’t covered under the business unit structure. It was a place for new projects and innovations to grow”
Noel Hatch, Projects and Research Lead, Innovation Unit, Kent County Council.
4. Sharing good practice and avoiding duplication of work
“It has been very useful in seeing the broad questions out there and to see how people are tackling big issues, Quite often we’re all doing the same bit of work, so it’s valuable to have a place where you can come together to discuss it.”
Stewart Martin, Community Leadership Policy Officer, Hertfordshire County Council
5. Connecting local and central government
“It’s useful as my main interface is central government so it’s a good forum to hear from local practitioners. It’s a good way of getting a feel for what the issues are for local authorities in relation to sustainability.”
Denny Gray, Policy Analyst, Sustainable Development Commission
6. Reducing carbon footprint
“It cuts down on meetings and travel, so in an age when local government is all about value for money, efficiency and sustainability, it fits well.”
Kanza Ahmed, National Management Trainee, Warrington Borough Council
7. Rapid induction to new roles and staff development
“It’s a fabulous resource for people in my position who move around placements. You get thrown into the deep end and are expected to swim, so it’s the first point of contact if you start a new project.”
Helen Burkhalter, Policy Officer, Denbighshire County Council
8. Building relationships and transcending organisational boundaries
“As a chief executive I tend to think of it (Communities of Practice) as a way of expanding my organisation, because now I can ask somebody a question about leadership and development in the region and they can go off and talk to other people on the Communities of Practice and come back with an answer. So we are expanding our own organisation’s boundaries to actually help each other across the region“.
Andrea Hill, Chief Executive, Suffolk County Council
What other organisations from public and private sectors have been involved?
The Scottish Improvement Service has entered into a major financial partnership with the IDeA to bring CoPs to Scotland, and financial arrangements have been made with other public sector organisations such as SOCITM and the NHS. Of the 650 individual communities, the IDeA itself only manages about 150, with various councils managing 275, the Scottish Improvement Service 50, NHS 100, and the remaining 75 are run by government organisations including: COI, BERR, NAO, Cabinet Office, OGC, Association of Chief Police Officers, Office for National Statistics, CLG, DfID and several more.
CoPs has membership from every single council in Wales, Scotland and England, and an estimated 7,000 further members from central government and other public sector bodies
So, a great example of how technology, process and people (and especially people!) can combine to bring about new and more effective ways of working, with real benefits to individuals through being able to find and connect with peers and experts, and more opportunities for adding value to public sector services.
