As some of my regular readers will know, I’m involved in a major new project to deliver the ‘next generation’ community of practice platform for UK local government organisations – see previous blog posts about the ‘Knowledge Hub’. The current platform has been (and continues to be) a huge success, with over 63,000 users and more than 1,300 active CoPs, working towards various outcomes but with a common goal to improve public service. These will eventually be migrated to the new platform when it goes live early in 2011.

The new platform will use open source software and delivered using an agile development process (a series of Sprints and Scrum workshops), which means incremental but rapid delivery of features and enhancements. More about this in a future post.

Having been heavily involved in the architecture and design of the current platform, I was caused to reflect on some of the key design characteristics that need to be considered as we progress to the new platform. In fact, we should be able to learn from the mistakes (yes, there were quite a few) in the design of the original platform and ensure these characteristics are optimised for the new environment.  Not all of this is hard-wired stuff, but it should cause developers and system administrators to ponder on whether their design solution will support the usability and sociability requirements needed to encourage community engagement, collaboration, reciprocity of knowledge and an inherent trusted community space.  Understanding the users and their needs is a key starting point.

Users typically want to know whether they can find and do what they want, when they want, and that their interactions are comfortable. The eight questions that follow raise the typical concerns expressed by most users. The answer to these questions provides heuristics for developers, system administrators and community moderators/facilitators. In conjunction with guidelines, they are useful for guiding the development process and planning evaluations. They will be used as we begin the development and design for the Knowledge Hub.

It’s taken a while for me to get around to posting an update to my ‘Knowledge Hub Part 1’ post, mainly as a result of being fully immersed in the technology procurement process these past several months.  This phase is now almost complete and we will shortly be starting on the actual development of the Hub, so now seems to be an opportune moment to remind everyone what this ‘Knowledge Hub’ thing is, and to give a first airing of the accompanying video (commissioned from Learning Pool – thanks guys). The following is brief summary, partially lifted from an explanation I produced for http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub – and in plain English as far as I’m able:

What is it?

The Knowledge Hub is essentially the next generation development of the highly successful local government CoP platform (a previous project of mine).  It will replace the existing infrastructure with new open technology facilitating integration with mainstream social media applications (for example Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN) and the rapid assimilation of new applications and web services as they emerge.  This will enable, for example, much better personalisation and permeability of content.  In addition Knowledge Hub will provide facilities that allow data on performance to be combined and shared (so called “linked-data”) potentially providing the framework to deliver the wider move to transparent government

Why is it important?

As the UK moves towards economic recovery it is expected there will be greater demands on local government to:

• continue to demonstrate cost-effective delivery methods
• be ‘fleeter of foot’ in gathering and using sector knowledge – not only to learn from others’ experience but also to accelerate the development and implementation of innovative delivery.

The strategy is based on the premise that knowledge of ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t work’ can be found within the local government community. Unleashed, this knowledge can be collectively focused on excellent public service delivery.

The overarching outcome of the Knowledge Hub programme is that by 2012/13, the culture of local government will be one of collaborative knowledge generation. This will involve everyone learning, sharing and problem-solving using a technology platform provided by LG Improvement & Development but owned by the local government sector.

While a working title of a ‘Knowledge Hub’ is being used it is perhaps more appropriate to use the metaphor of a dynamo-powered light, which shines brighter and illuminates the way more clearly the more involvement there is from participants and users.

What is the scope?

The Knowledge Hub will comprise three interdependent elements:

(a) Technology:

This includes the systems, software applications, hosting and service support.

(b) Data:

This will be a combination of:

• user-generated content (blogs, wikis, forums, libraries etc.)
• system-generated content (data visualisation, graphs, reports, statistics)
• approved datasets (open and linked data)
• incoming data feeds (RSS, Atom etc.)

(c) Knowledge Ecology

Support for and development of culture and user behaviours that will foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge sharing and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration.

Some of the key features

The Knowledge Hub will not replicate or replace any similar initiatives currently being used, developed or proposed by individual councils or partnerships. Rather, the Hub will bring together information about innovation and good practice from any number of these sources to help the development of the whole sector.

• It will be a web-based service and will be accessible through any device with web capability, including mobile phones and PDAs.
• The technology and systems will support ‘agile’ development, allowing new functionality and services to be added quickly.
• It will find and follow people with same/similar interests, leading to opportunities for collaboration coproduction and partnership working.
• It will provide visualisation tools e.g. ‘heat maps’ showing emerging trends and ideas.
• It will enable performance data to be shared between councils for comparison and benchmarks.
• It will have a ’serendipity engine’ which will identify related ideas and themes.
• It will aggregate and integrate conversations and content from different sources and enable key themes to ‘bubble up’ to the top.
• It will support open standards and be available as an open platform with a published application programming interface (API) enabling third party developers and social innovators to create new applications, widgets and mashups.
• It will be launched in the first quarter of 2011.

Now see the video!

My thanks to Jesus Matinez Marin and the organising committee for inviting me to address the Congreso Internacional EDO 2010 Conference in Barcelona (12-14 May). I only hope that I didn’t cause too many problems for the Spanish and Catalan translators who gave a real-time audio translation to the audience. I am particularly honoured to have been included in the official book “Nuevas estrategias formativas para las organizaciones“, which (relying on Google Translate)  means “New training strategies for organizations”.

The presentation I gave is available on Slideshare and embedded below.

I very much appreciate the hospitality shown to me during my stay in Barcelona and look forward to continued collaboration with the Generalitat de Catalunya Department de Justicia as they develop their knowledge management strategy.

The presentation I gave looks at the phenomenon of Communities of Practice in the public sector and how they can develop into effective knowledge sharing and learning environments. Topics I covered included:

• What is a ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP)?
• Moving from conversations to collaboration
• Community culture and behaviours
• What makes a successful community?
• Measuring success and the elusive ROI
• Lessons learnt from deployment of CoPs in UK local government.

Cultivating knowledge through Communities of Practice

View more presentations from Semantix (UK) Ltd.

Other links:

Departament de Justícia de la Generalitat de Catalunya YouTube Channel

Departament de Justica on Slideshare

Blog

Departament de Justica Knowledge Management Programme

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.

Thanks to the KM team for arranging this session.

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 20^th 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))

1. Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
2. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
3. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement journey.
4. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 111
5. 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:

1. Identify your current performance and compare it with others and identify how the council’s performance is contributing to this indicator.
2. 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 )
3. Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
4. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
5. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement journey
6. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 39
7. 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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

In the mean time, if you’d like to contribute to the conversations around the Knowledge Hub, head over to Social by Social and join the Khub Group.

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything about the Knowledge Hub (Khub) Advisory Group meeting that took place last week (17^th 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’Reilly who 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!

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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.